Zero

by Masatake Okumiya

  Japan could not avoid total defeat, but the enemy would pay dearly for every foot of Japanese soil. So stated the government which, despite the knowledge that by mid-summer of 1945 our nation was nearly prostrate, elected to conclude the war in a bath of blood by resisting the immi­nent invasion with every available man.

  CHAPTER 28

  The Atomic Bombings: Personal Observations of Masatake Okumiya

  BY AUGUST OF 1945 the Pacific Ocean and the waters surrounding the four main Japanese islands had become an “American lake.” Enemy warships in powerful task forces roamed along our coast, safe from attack, hurling thousands of shells into anything which moved on the shore, or into any buildings or other struc­tures they deemed worthwhile targets. Enemy planes flew literally thousands of sorties over every square foot of the mainland. Western Japan fell under the control of enemy planes based on Okinawa. Eastern Japan reeled under the hammering strikes of the B-29s and P-51s from Saipan and Iwo Jima. The Americans ruled the sea and the air sur­rounding and over the entire country. We were denied free­dom of movement even in the interior, for the searching planes shot up trains, small boats, cars, trucks, communi­cations facilities—anything and everything.

  The Army and Navy kept its planes on the ground, hidden beneath camouflage, in underground hangars, and scattered to dispersal areas as far as five miles from the airfields. We hoarded this last air fleet of 5,130 combat planes, in addition to several thousand trainers, which we would hurl against the invasion fleet which even then was assembling for the attack against Kyushu. These consisted of twenty-five hundred Army planes, of which sixteen hundred were Kamikazes, and twenty-six hundred and thirty Navy planes, including fourteen hundred suicide fighters and bombers. When the attack came we could throw in every airplane in Japan which could fly and carry bombs, including the slow and flimsy trainers.

  It was clear to everyone that Japan could not avoid overwhelming defeat. We knew that our allout defense of the islands was little more than a delaying operation which could result only in hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the bitter fighting to come. Despite this realization, the government elected to fight to the last man. It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain in logical terms the mental state of Japan’s leaders, who insisted upon resisting what cer­tainly would be the greatest invasion force in history.

  This determination did not last very long. On August 6, 1945, there arose a new factor. The impact of the atomic bombing, first to Hiroshima and then, on August 9, of Nagasaki, was not immediate, because it required time before the government could assay the tremendous machine of destruction which the enemy had hurled at Japan. Once, however, our military and government lead­ers gained a fuller appreciation of this fantastic weapon which could make even the horror of the incendiary raids seem as only minor irritations, they could not commit themselves to the insane folly of continuing the war.

  The city of Hiroshima had escaped the fury of the B-29s, and yet it held certain installations which we knew might invite a rain of bombs upon the city. It contained the 2nd Army Group Headquarters, which commanded the ground defense of the southern half of Japan. Tens of thousands of troops had assembled at Hiroshima during the war, and the city had become a major storage point and communications center. Hiroshima lay on the wide and flat delta of the Ota River. The seven river channel outlets divided the city into six islands which jutted out into Hiroshima Bay. Except for a single hill in the center of the city about two hundred feet high, Hiroshima was almost entirely flat and just slightly above sea level. Only seven square miles of the city’s total twenty-six-square-mile area was built up, and 75 per cent of the population crowded into this area.

  Except for its center, which featured a number of reinforced-concrete structures, the city overflowed with a dense collection of small wooden houses and wooden workshops. Even the majority of industrial buildings were of wood.

  A little after seven o’clock on the morning of August 6, our early warning radar network picked up several enemy planes approaching southern Japan. Military authorities gave the air-raid alert and many cities, including Hiroshima, ceased their radio broadcasts. By eight A.M. the Hiroshima aircraft spotters clearly identified the incoming planes as only three aircraft flying at a very high altitude, and the all-clear signal was given. Hiroshima’s radio sta­tion broadcast the news of the three planes and informed the people that, should the planes appear over the city, it might be advisable to seek shelter.

  Approximately at 0830 hours, Lieutenant (J.G.) Naka­jima, the air-defense duty officer, notified me that an emergency telephone call had come in for me. At the time I was on duty in the second basement of the underground air-raid shelter which had been built inside the Navy Department’s compound at Kasumigazeki, Koji-machi, Tokyo. The three-story subterranean shelter was the brain center of naval operations and the communications center of Japan’s naval air defense (the Navy Department headquarters building was destroyed by fire May 27). All reports from the radar stations, patrol vessels, and aircraft spotters regarding enemy plane movements from the Mar­ianas or aircraft carriers centered here.

  The telephone call was from the Air Defense Command headquarters at the Kure Naval Station. I heard Comman­der Hiroki’s voice “. . . about fifteen minutes ago there was a terrible flash over Hiroshima. Immediately afterward a terrible mushroomlike cloud rose into the sky over the city. Many of the people here heard a heavy roar, something like distant thunder. I don’t know what happened there, but from the flash and the cloud it must have been something big. I tried to reach Headquarters of the Second Army Group by phone, but there is no answer. This is all I know right now . . . . I’ll send in the details just as quickly as I get them—”

  Kure Naval Station is about twelve miles south of the center of Hiroshima City.

  I interrupted. “Do you know if it was an air raid, or some other explosion on the ground?”

  “I don’t know what it was. Only a few B-29s were seen, that’s all.”

  “What’s the weather like?” I asked.

  “Fine.”

  “All right. Call me as soon as you get more information.”

  The entire affair made me feel uneasy. There was no ordinary explanation for a “bright flash” and a “tremen­dous cloud.” I felt as though something ominous had hap­pened. I queried the members of the Naval General Staff, but without success. No one had any idea of what could have happened at Hiroshima. There was one other place, however, which might provide the answer, and I called Captain Yasui of the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics.

  I related the details as given me by Commander Hiroki. Captain Yasui’s reply was staggering. I remember clearly his words that “. . . it may be an atomic bomb, but I can’t tell until I actually look at the city....”

  Atomic bomb! It was possible! The words struck a familiar note in my mind. I remembered that long ago the Navy in secret conferences had discussed the possibility of nuclear weapons. The basic theory was no secret. Several years ago the Navy had requested Dr. Arakatsu of Kyoto University, where the brilliant Dr. Yukawa worked, to study the possibilities. The Army too was investigating the theory of an atomic weapon; Dr. Nishina of the Physical and Chemical Research Institute had studied the matter in detail. But this work was hardly more than scientific investigation.

  Could the enemy actually have used such a fantastic weapon?

  Meanwhile several phone calls had come in from the Army General Staff. The Army was concerned; they had been unable to raise Hiroshima, either by telephone or by radio. Hiroshima was a vital strategic center of Army oper­ations . . . they were anxious for a report.

  Just before noon we heard again from Kure.

  “At 0815 hours this morning, immediately after two B-29s passed with high speed over the city, there was a searing flash, like a fantastic flash of lightning. It was fol­lowed by a sudden, roaring sound. In the next instant houses collapsed all across the city. It is as though a great steel fist had suddenly descended on Hiroshima. Fire
s broke out everywhere. Everything is all confused. The raging flames and the streams of refugees have made it impossible to get in touch with any place closer than Kaidaichi (about five miles southeast of the city).”

  These reports were unbelievable. Everything was so sudden. Regardless of what happened, it was imperative that I, in command of the navy’s homeland air defense, must get to the scene. Headquarters ordered that I proceed with Captain Yasui to Hiroshima to investigate personally what had occurred. We could not take off the same day, despite our anxiety; enemy planes in successive raids roamed over Japan.

  On the afternoon of the following day, August 7, we took off with difficulty from Tokyo. We wished to make a full investigation from the air but by the time we arrived over Hiroshima the sun had set. Even on the second day, however, we found an incredible scene confronting us. A ghastly and terrible light flared from the stricken city. The still-burning Hiroshima cast a deepred, flickering glow which was reflected from the black smoke which billowed upward from the earth.

  Shortly afterward, our transport glided in for a landing at the Iwakuni Naval Air Base. Early the next morning, we rushed to Hiroshima.

  Nothing—neither films, magazines, books, eloquent speeches—nothing can possibly express to any other person except those actual witnesses at Hiroshima what had hap­pened to the city, and what occurred after the bomb fell. It was an appalling spectacle beyond the power of words to describe. Cold printed or celluloid media cannot carry the sounds and smells and “feelings” of the shattered city.

  Hiroshima’s debacle is a familiar tale, but all the thousands of stories do not reproduce the shuddering and screaming cries of the victims who already were beyond all possible help; they do not show you the dust and ash swirling about the burned bodies which groveled and writhed in indescribable agony; the twitching and spas­modic jerking of fingers which were the only expressions of agony; the seeking of water by things which only a short while before had been human beings.

  Words do not convey the overwhelming, choking, nau­seating stench, not from the dead, but from the seared living-dead. The unharmed, or only slightly injured, sur­vivors, placed these burned, dying men and women on planks and mats in long, impersonal rows like decaying fish, so that when they died their bodies would not have to be stacked by people attending to those still living. How many times has the story been told, but with the limited effects of words, of the young mother whom I watched in the agony of dying, not a word passing through her blis­tered lips, her stomach sheared open, her intestines sprawled in the ash and dust, her living but unborn infant caked in blood and dirt on the ground beside her?

  This was the Hiroshima I saw. Even today the full story remains obscure, for it is impossible to tell all of the many things which the subconscious happily refuses to allow one to remember. I have never yet seen a single report of the white soldier, a prisoner of war we can identify only as white, as the corpse was terribly seared, sprawled in the wreckage of the city’s main street, only three hundred feet from ground zero. Here was one man’s direct sacrifice to the atom of his countrymen or, at least, of his Allies.

  Where Hiroshima had existed now there was only a dirty brown scar on the face of the land. The people did lit­erally nothing, they could do nothing, to extract themselves from the incredible misery thrust upon them. Staff officers from Tokyo who flew to Hiroshima with me, and others who followed, joined in the first relief measures.

  Sixteen hours after the bomb struck intelligence offi­cers learned for the first time what really had ripped the city apart. The radio carried the American announcement of the atomic bomb.

  Three days later, at 7:50 A.M., Japanese time, the air-raid sirens sounded over the city of Nagasaki, which lies at the head of a long bay which forms the best natural harbor on Kyushu. The city spread across two valleys through which two rivers flowed. Separating the residential and industrial areas was a mountain spur which contributed to Nagasaki’s irregular layout, and which confined the built-up portion of the city to less than four square miles of the city’s limits of thirty-five square miles.

  Nagasaki was one of the largest seaports in southern Japan and was vitally important to our military forces with its many and varied industries, including those producing weapons, ships, military equipment, and other materials. Along one narrow strip of the city the Mitsubishi Steel Works and Dockyards lay to the south, and to the north sprawled the Mitsubishi-Urakami Torpedo Works. Unlike the industrial portions of the city, the residential areas were the typical flimsy, tile-roofed wooden buildings, jammed into a dense concentration particularly susceptible to fire.

  The air-raid warning was given at 7:50 A.M., but forty minutes later the all-clear signal brought the people from their shelters. When at 10:53 A.M. our spotters sighted two B-29s, high over the city, they assumed a reconnaissance mission was on, and did not sound any further alarms. However, on seeing the B-29s, several hundred people hur­ried to shelters. Only nine days before, some high explosive bombs had been dropped on the city, and several of them fell in the shipyards and dock areas. Others exploded at the Mitsubishi Steel Works and Ordnance Works, and six bombs smashed into the Nagasaki Medical College and Hospital, with three direct hits on the buildings. While the bombs caused little damage, they frightened the people, who were led to believe that heavy incendiary raids were in store for the city.

  At 11:30 A.M. there occurred the blinding flash of an explosion such as had destroyed Hiroshima slightly less than seventy-five hours before. Another city joined the evergrowing list of Japanese centers destroyed and wrecked.

  Even the worst diehards in the government could see little cause for continuing the folly of resisting an enemy which threatened to hurl a rain of these bombs against Japan.

  On August 15, 1945, with a country literally beaten to its knees, the Emperor accepted the surrender terms. The war was over.

  Soon after the surrender the Army announced that in Hiroshima 78,150 people had died, that 51,408 were injured or missing, that 48,000 buildings were totally destroyed, and that 22,178 other structures received light to severe damage. At least 176,987 people were made homeless. Listed casualties in Nagasaki included 23,753 dead and 43,020 injured.

  These lists were at the best only informed estimates, and the steady numbers of persons succumbing to the aftereffects of the two attacks caused the total list of casu­alties constantly to rise. Many Japanese sources openly questioned the announced casualty figures and today the best-informed Japanese sources believe that at least two to three times as many people were killed and injured as was originally stated.

  The immediate postwar casualty survey conducted by the Army, which since then has added many names to the dead and injured lists, was as follows:

  Japan faced the coming winter of 1945–46 in perilous condition. Almost all of our important cities—ninety-eight in all-were burned out. The official Army report on the bombings stated that seventy-two of these had few if any important military establishments, that the B-29s had gone after both industry and the civil populace. In the Tokyo-Yokohama area, 56 per cent of the buildings were gone; 52 per cent in the Nagoya area; and 57 per cent in the Kobe-Osaka area. The cities suffered varying degrees of loss of residential structures, Nishinomiya losing only 9.1 per cent, while Fukuyama lost 96 per cent, Kofu and Hama­matsu 72 per cent, and Hitachi, 71 per cent. The initial studies indicated that one million, four hundred and thirty thousand buildings were totally destroyed; later this figure rose to more than two million, directly affecting more than nine million people.

  At the war’s end, our communications and transporta­tion lines were in a chaotic state. Ships which formerly plied between the main islands as well as those which had sailed to Korea and China remained hidden in harbors to escape the guns, bombs, and rockets of searching enemy planes. We had lost staggering numbers of these supply vessels and had all too few available at the time of surren­der. Even had we been well supplied with ships, we could not have used them to great
advantage, for the waters in and around bays, ports, and straits were thick with deadly enemy mines sown by B-29s. We suffered from a serious shortage of men for land transportation work and steve­dores to load ships. Almost all these great cracks in the national economy were traceable to the loss of control of the air over the mainland.

  On Kyushu, a fraction of the normal train schedules were kept during the day. Many trains which left on trips were shot to pieces by fighters and failed to arrive at their destinations. The constant aerial interference completely disrupted the ferry service between Aomori and Hakodate. Honshu’s mainland communications and land transporta­tion lines functioned, but in a wild state of confusion and disrepair, and these operated only because the bombers had not concentrated on our rail lines.

  We were dangerously short of food supplies for our people. In July of 1945 the government reluctantly ordered a cut of 10 per cent in the staple food ration, which amounted to a ration of 312 grams per adult person per day of staple food, including substitutes. In the seasons between rice-crop harvesting, we feared a possible famine, for the islands were virtually cut off from outside food supply. The supply of non-staple food and seasoning was reduced by 20 per cent in meat, 30 per cent in fish, and 50 per cent in seasoning from the amounts available in 1941.

  As against what was available to the Japanese people in 1937, they could obtain only 2 per cent of cotton goods, 1 per cent of woolen goods, 4 per cent of soap, and 8 per cent of paper.

  These poverty-stricken conditions caused wild and run-away inflation and contributed much to lower the morale of the people and to destroy their will to continue the war.

  Our industries, including those which had escaped the terrible blows of the B-29s, were virtually at a standstill, great ghosts of factories no longer with meaning or pur­pose. Our industrial production had plummeted with the steady and increasingly severe bombings. For the first fis­cal quarter of 1945 (April to June), coal production was down 29 per cent, iron and other metals 65 per cent, chem­ical products 48 per cent, and liquid fuels 66 per cent, compared to the highest fiscal quarter of the war. The aircraft factories especially had been terribly damaged, with several of our larger plants as much as 96 per cent destroyed.