Mr Two Bomb

by William Coles

  So that morning, while he was off for some meeting at Hiroshima’s old castle, it was the perfect opportunity for me to delve and pry. I have always been a snooper; perhaps I should have become a journalist.

  I walked across the common-room and lifted the Emperor’s portrait off the wall. Behind it, just as I expected, was a little hole which contained the key to Akiba’s room. It had never once occurred to the brute that one of his staff might venture into his office.

  I took the key and carefully replaced the picture, before letting myself into Akiba’s office. Should have taken the trouble to lock the door behind me. Or perhaps not, seeing as how events turned out.

  Just as you would expect from a disciplinarian like Akiba, his corner-office was immaculate. The room was high and airy, with two spectacular walls of windows that stretched from waist height all the way up to the ceiling. As befitted someone of Akiba’s rank, they were cleaned weekly. Behind his wooden desk was a view of the entire city of Hiroshima, and beyond it the cocooning embrace of the mountains.

  For the moment, I ignored the four grey filing cabinets that were standing against the wall underneath another picture of the Emperor. If Akiba had anything of value, he would keep it in his desk. I pulled up the sturdy wooden chair and made myself at home. He didn’t have the imagination to lock his desk; it was beyond his comprehensionthat someone might dare to rifle through his personal possessions. How little he knew me.

  I hit gold with the first drawer that I opened. It was a broad drawer, a full 40 centimetres wide, and I had thought it might contain some of Akiba’s more personal jottings. But as the drawer squeaked open, I realised with delight that it was his personal drinks cabinet. It contained not one but two bottles of Sake, as well as a single cut crystal glass. Why have two glasses when you had no intention of ever sharing your drink?

  Sake! How I love the stuff, and, even now that I am in my nineties, I still treat myself to a daily tot. In the latter days of the war, good Sake was fantastically difficult to come by. It could not be bought for love nor money. Some friends back in Nagasaki had attempted to distil their own rice spirit, but it was so rough that the headache had kicked in long before I’d felt even remotely inebriated.

  But this Sake, I could see from the label, was of the very best quality Kamoizumi. As stated earlier, it was in my nature to snatch up every gift the very moment it passed me by. Though perhaps I did have a tingle of what was about to befall us, for I was suddenly possessed by the most reckless abandon. I poured out three fingers into Akiba’s cut-crystal glass and, leaning back on his chair, I kicked my big seaman’s boots up onto the polished desk. I delighted at the sight of those ugly old boots on his black-lacquered desk; how that pompous piece of puffery would have exploded if he had seen me!

  I had a stunning view of the Tenma River, the water so dazzling it might have been carpeted with jewels. I took a long sip of the Sake, holding it in my mouth before letting it razor down the back of my throat. It had been so long since I had tasted decent Sake that I had quite forgotten its soft kick, which seems to mainline those intoxicating earthy fumes straight to your brain.

  How blissful it was to sit there with a glass of Akiba’s Sake in my hand, making myself at home in his spit-polished office. Was this, I wondered, how my indignant little master liked to spend his evenings, admiring the view and quietly filling out the interminable paperwork that came with rank?

  In another drawer, I found, of all things, a number of red onions. I ate one of them there and then, stuffing the wispy peelings into my pocket. And even six hours later, as I tried to dig Sumie out of the rubble, I could still smell the onion on my breath; just a tiny reminder of my life before Little Boy.

  I found some personal files and was leafing through them. There was one with Motoji’s dour face clipped to the cover. Along with all his service details, there was a single word summary at the top: ‘Diligent’. I snorted in derision.

  My own file, complete with a similarly wan photo, was a little further down the pile. Akiba had used two words, not one, to sum me up: ‘Lazy. Insubordinate.’ Perhaps he knew me better than I thought. I helped myself to more Sake, delighting in the rainbow hue of the cut crystal.

  It was just after 8am and I was gazing out over the port waterway that once had been so brimful of activity. An old man was rowing across the river, squat arms as rhythmic as a marionette. His wife was with him at the back of the boat, trawling for their supper. Like many of the people I saw that day, I never found out if they survived the bomb. They were just another fleeting glimpse of humanity before Hiroshima’s slate was wiped clean.

  Akiba was into the room so fast that I did not even have time to get my boots off his desk. One moment I was staring out over the dock and the next the door had exploded open and striding into the office was Akiba in all his martial grandeur. I was so startled that I dropped the glass of Sake. It smashed on the floor as I whipped my boots off the desk.

  Akiba, small and perfectly turned out in his crisp khaki uniform, was so wild with rage that he could barely speak. Behind him, cringeing in the common room like some malign toad, I could just make out the hunched figure of Motoji.

  I quickly got to my feet. I still had one of the files in my hand. I returned it to the desk and then, not knowing what else to do, stood to attention.

  “You!” Akiba shrieked, slowly stalking the desk towards me. “You dog! You devil!”

  I continued to stand at attention, eyes lightly focused not on Akiba but on the wall ahead of me. I wondered what, if anything, to say.

  Akiba cracked me across the face with the swagger stick that he carried for effect. “Get out from there! Get away from my desk! Get away! I could shoot you on the spot!”

  I moved around the desk and was about to quit the room. “Close the door!” he screamed past me. Then to me: “Stand there! Stand there! Don’t move!” He was pacing now, up and down by the window, backwards and forwards, slapping his swagger stick into the palm of his hand. He was so agitated that he was still wearing his army cap.

  He suddenly noticed the shards of cut-crystal grinding beneath his boots and howled with rage. “My glass!” he said. “You drank my Sake! You broke my glass!”

  He was more annoyed by that than anything else. He started thrashing me about the head with his stick. “You will pay for this! Dog! You piece of filth! You whoreson!” He was stamping his feet with rage as he lashed at me over and over again. “I will see you court martialled for this. I will have you shot! I will shoot you myself, you treacherous cur!”

  I tried to protect myself, shielding my head with my hands. I sometimes wonder why I did not hit him. I suppose that old instincts die hard. Even in my parlous position, I could not bring myself to strike a commanding officer.

  Eventually, after Akiba had beaten out his rage with his swagger stick, he had calmed enough to sit behind his desk. Very precisely he placed his stick next to the telephone. After the storm, the calm. For a full minute he stared at me, hands clasped lightly in front of him on the black-lacquered desk, his smooth face now a wax mask. The blows ached a little, but were not yet painful. I had been staring out of the window, but my eyes momentarily flickered down.

  In that one minute before the bomb exploded, it is odd what still lingers. I remember gazing at that thin strip of a moustache above his top lip and wondering to myself just how much time he needed every morning to shave it quite so precisely.

  At length, Akiba got to his feet and, turning his back on me, stared out of the window. His short figure, hands clasped behind his back, was almost silhouetted against the bright lines of Hiroshima city.

  “I have always known you were like this,” he said with icy control. “And I wish to God I had acted upon it. “You will leave this room now. When the guard arrives, you will return here. You will be put under close arrest and taken to the military prison. I will see that you face every conceivable charge that can be brought against you.”

  I continued to stare out of
the window, dully registering Akiba’s words. Not that I felt anything, other than mild resignation – these threats of punishment take time to sink in.

  Of all the things to look at, I was staring at the domed top of the Industry Promotion Hall, built in 1915 by the Czech architect Jan Letzel. Normally you could not see it from the warehouse, but the firebreaks had completely opened up the view. It was said to be a masterpiece of modern architecture. Perhaps so.

  I wonder what that Czech architect would have thought had he known that his dome was about to be immortalised and would stand for all time as Hiroshima’s sole relic of the bomb.

  At that very moment, nine kilometres above Hiroshima, Tom Ferebee was lining up the cross-hairs of his M-9B Norden bomb-sight on, as he called it, “the best goddamn target in the whole of the war” – the very central junction of the Aioi bridge, not 100 metres from the Promotion Hall.

  I had actually noticed the plane, in fact two planes, a few seconds earlier. It was hard to miss the two bright spots of quick-silver beetling across the clear blue sky. A long way behind them trailed a third plane.

  Then something happened that I had never seen before. The B29s were far too high to be hit by any of our anti-aircraft guns, yet from out of the second plane appeared three white parachutes. Were pilot and crew abandoning the bomber?

  A number of our citizens certainly thought so, and all about Hiroshima people had started to applaud. One last moment of gilded innocence. It was not airmen that were dangling from the three parachutes, but three aluminium canisters, the better for the Yankees to gauge the full effects of their explosion.

  As for that five-ton bomb Little Boy, with its mass of electronics and Uranium 235; well, that had already been dropped. At that very moment, it was already whistling down towards Hiroshima at over 1,000kph, where after 45 seconds it was set to explode precisely 580 metres above the city.

  I think that Akiba must also have registered the sight of the planes. They had seemed to split off, each sheering away from the others. “Get out of here,” Akiba said, his face tilted up to the mountain-tops. “Get out now. I am sickened by your presence. Go! If it is permitted, I will shoot you with my own hand. Now go!”

  I closed the door behind me, and my last glimpse of that office was of Akiba still staring up at the sky. As of Hiroshima herself, she was like some sacrificial cow that had been gently led to the slaughter, unaware that her final moment had come.

  Outside Akiba’s office, I stare out of the window for a moment before pausing to press my forehead against the metal door. How refreshingly cold the door feels against my forehead and nose after the sweating heat of Akiba’s glasshouse. My cheeks, skull and shoulders are tender from Akiba’s blows. Watched by the serene portrait of our Emperor, I take the five steps across the common-room to the warehouse door; not a moment to lose now, not one single second. No time to tarry, not a moment left to admire the view. Hiroshima’s wheel of fate was finally gliding to a halt, and our entire lives hung on what we happened to be doing during a single split second of time.

  Two steps, one step, I stand at the common-room door. Through the door is life. To stay in the common-room for even two more seconds is death. I smoothly turn the handle. A last look over my shoulder at the green mountains. I pause for a moment, surfing that teetering cusp between life and death. And, not that it makes any difference, not that a single second could ever make any difference to the trajectory of our lives, fate makes its decision. I slip through to the cool of the warehouse. The door clicks firmly behind me.

  I can see very little in the gloom of the warehouse, but I can hear. I can hear Masanobu Furuta, that calm, soothing voice of Hiroshima Radio: “Chugoku District Army announcement: three large enemy planes proceeding ...”

  For many people, those were the last words that they ever heard.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Enola Gay. She was about to be immortalised and her name would for all time be inextricably linked with Little Boy and Hiroshima itself.

  I have always felt it odd that Colonel Paul Tibbets named his plane after his mother. I am told that on the day before our execution, Tibbets changed the name of his hand-picked B29 bomber. So now and forever more, Enola Gay will be remembered as a bringer of death and a shatterer of worlds. Thanks, Son.

  No-one remembers the name of the plane or the pilot that dropped the second bomb, Fat Man. Not one single person, that is, apart from a few old crones like myself who survived Nagasaki. But all the details of the world’s first atomic bomb, from its pilot to its plane, have gone into the history books.

  For many years, I had felt indifferent to Colonel Tibbets. He was, he claimed, just a man who was obeying orders. Given the chance, he would do it all over again. “I have absolutely no feeling of guilt,” he said, 20 years later. “I have learned in all these years of military service to follow orders, so I followed them without question.”

  Like millions of servicemen around the world, from the Nazi storm-troopers to the guards in the Japanese prison camps, Tibbets was merely obeying orders. But any respect I might have had for the Colonel evaporated when I heard what he did in Texas in 1976. Tibbets, by then aged 61 and a retired Brigadier General, took part in an air-show. He was flying a B29 identical to his Enola Gay, and there for the benefit of the 40,000 Texan spectators dropped a mock-up of Little Boy, complete with its own mushroom cloud. He landed to wild applause from the hotdog-munching Texans. Grotesque.

  But it said so much about Tibbets, who, far from just being his master’s tool, was a glory-hunter who revelled in his place in the history. Had he perhaps forgotten that nearly 200,000 people were killed by Little Boy? Had it never occurred to him that some of Hiroshima’s survivors might, even 30 years on, be offended by his glorification of the bomb? What next for the thrill-seeking Texans? Why not recreate the use of the world’s first torpedo? Or perhaps they might lay on a replica of the world’s first concentration camp, built by the British to incarcerate the Boers? Or even a recreation of the first unveiling of the Gatling gun, used to such good effect during the American Civil War?

  The true beauty of Little Boy – at least as far as Tibbets was concerned – was that he never had to witness the carnage. Dropping a bomb from 9km up is quite different from having to kill a man as you look him in the eyes. No, Tibbets’ one tenuous piece of ‘fellow-feeling’ with the people of Hiroshima came when his plane was hit by the shockwave. Even though the Enola Gay was some 18 kilometres from the Aioi Bridge, the crew felt as if their plane was being pummelled by flak.

  Down on the ground, that same shockwave had already reduced most of Hiroshima to rubble. And what little of the city that survived had by the end of the day been reduced to ashes in the subsequent firestorm.

  My introduction to the atomic era was that first enormous flash, as if a spotlight in the heavens had suddenly been turned on to this new global star. Though I have witnessed two atomic bombs, I have never seen the flash directly – but I am told that for two or three seconds it burned brighter than 10,000 suns, burning everything it touched within a radius of one kilometre. Men like my beggar on the bank-steps were not just killed but atomised in the blink of an eye.

  At least for them it was quick, which is more than could be said for the majority of Hiroshima’s victims. For those who survived the first flash, many had to eke out their last days, weeks, even years, in a miasma of pain, not just skinned alive, but with their eyes boiled out of their sockets and their internal organs macerated beyond repair. And all this was merely the after-effects of the flash and the shockwave; or as it is known in Japan, ‘pikadon’ which means literally ‘flashboom’.

  Only months later would we begin to appreciate the much more insidious harm that was being done by the radiation, which rots away at your insides until your whole body, from head to toe, is nothing but one ragged-raw nerve-ending of pain. There’s a reason the radiation sickness is known in Japan as ‘Itai-itai’. I can still remember the constant cry of that twoword refrain
which, even years afterwards, I was still hearing in the hospitals. It means simply, ‘It hurts. It hurts’. For many, death came as a merciful release.

  The flash filled the whole of that dingy warehouse with light, as if every wall of the room had been lined with the most brilliant arc-lights. It seemed to come not just through the rooftop windows, but through the very walls. I am told that it was so bright that it was seen from over 100 miles away, by a woman who was blind. Those that saw it close up in Hiroshima were blinded for life, their retinas shaved clean by just a single kilogram of fissioning Uranium 235. Humans, animals, houses and all were instantaneously cremated, and the only thing left of them was their shadows, etched into the concrete walls and the pavements, an echo of their last sad moment on earth.

  It was as dramatic an entrance onto the global stage as had ever been seen in history, and thus started a new world order. Over the millennia, the world has had its fill of genocides and mass executions, but never before have so many been wiped out in one single instant.

  We were being judged not on our actions, but on what we were doing at the precise moment when the wheel of fate stopped turning at 8.15am on Monday 6th August 1945. One man, a clerk, survived at the very focal point, the hypocenter, of the blast, having just been sent into the office basement to retrieve a file. I heard of a woman who stooped beneath the sink to retrieve her baby’s rattle and, by a whisker, missed being flensed by glass shards. A small boy, fleeing from bullies, had hidden himself in the sewer. Yes, every one of us who survived that first blast has their own story to tell and how fate had stepped in to save them.

  As soon as I saw the flash, I threw myself to the ground, doing exactly what we all had been trained to do. I lay face down on the floor, head cradled into my arms, my thumbs pressed deep into my eye-sockets and with my forefingers tight over my ears. A thump of hot air seemed to wash not just over me but right through me.