II—The Fire
Immediately
after the explosion, the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, having run
wildly out of the Matsui estate and having looked in wonderment at the
bloody soldiers at the mouth of the dugout they had been digging,
attached himself sympathetically to an old lady who was walking along in
a daze, holding her head with her left hand, supporting a small boy of
three or four on her back with her right, and crying, “I’m hurt! I’m
hurt! I’m hurt!” Mr. Tanimoto transferred the child to his own back and
led the woman by the hand down the street, which was darkened by what
seemed to be a local column of dust. He took the woman to a grammar
school not far away that had previously been designated for use as a
temporary hospital in case of emergency. By this solicitous behavior,
Mr. Tanimoto at once got rid of his terror. At the school, he was much
surprised to see glass all over the floor and fifty or sixty injured
people already waiting to be treated. He reflected that, although the
all-clear had sounded and he had heard no planes, several bombs must
have been dropped. He thought of a hillock in the rayon man’s garden
from which he could get a view of the whole of Koi—of the whole of
Hiroshima, for that matter—and he ran back up to the estate.
Mr. Tanimoto turned away from the sight when he heard Mr. Matsuo call out to ask whether he was all right. Mr. Matsuo had been safely cushioned within the falling house by the bedding stored in the front hall and had worked his way out. Mr. Tanimoto scarcely answered. He had thought of his wife and baby, his church, his home, his parishioners, all of them down in that awful murk. Once more he began to run in fear—toward the city.
Mrs.
Hatsuyo Nakamura, the tailor’ s widow, having struggled up from under
the ruins of her house after the explosion, and seeing Myeko, the
youngest of her three children, buried breast-deep and unable to move,
crawled across the debris, hauled at timbers, and flung tiles aside, in a
hurried effort to free the child. Then, from what seemed to be caverns
far below, she heard two small voices crying, “Tasukete! Tasukete! Help! Help!”
The voices from below answered.
Mrs. Nakamura abandoned Myeko, who at least could breathe, and in a frenzy made the wreckage fly above the crying voices. The children had been sleeping nearly ten feet apart, but now their voices seemed to come from the same place. Toshio, the boy, apparently had some freedom to move, because she could feel him undermining the pile of wood and tiles as she worked from above. At last she saw his head, and she hastily pulled him out by it. A mosquito net was wound intricately, as if it had been carefully wrapped, around his feet. He said he had been blown right across the room and had been on top of his sister Yaeko under the wreckage. She now said, from underneath, that she could not move, because there was something on her legs. With a bit more digging, Mrs. Nakamura cleared a hole above the child and began to pull her arm. “Itai! It hurts!” Yaeko cried. Mrs. Nakamura shouted, “There’s no time now to say whether it hurts or not,” and yanked her whimpering daughter up. Then she freed Myeko. The children were filthy and bruised, but none of them had a single cut or scratch.
Mrs. Nakamura took the children out into the street. They had nothing on but underpants, and although the day was very hot, she worried rather confusedly about their being cold, so she went back into the wreckage and burrowed underneath and found a bundle of clothes she had packed for an emergency, and she dressed them in pants, blouses, shoes, padded-cotton air-raid helmets called bokuzuki, and even, irrationally, overcoats. The children were silent, except for the five-year-old, Myeko, who kept asking questions: “Why is it night already? Why did our house fall down? What happened?” Mrs. Nakamura, who did not know what had happened (had not the all-clear sounded?), looked around and saw through the darkness that all the houses in her neighborhood had collapsed. The house next door, which its owner had been tearing down to make way for a fire lane, was now very thoroughly, if crudely, torn down; its owner, who had been sacrificing his home for the community’s safety, lay dead. Mrs. Nakamoto, wife of the head of the local air-raid-defense Neighborhood Association, came across the street with her head all bloody, and said that her baby was badly cut; did Mrs. Nakamura have any bandage? Mrs. Nakamura did not, but she crawled into the remains of her house again and pulled out some white cloth that she had been using in her work as a seamstress, ripped it into strips, and gave it to Mrs. Nakamoto. While fetching the cloth, she noticed her sewing machine; she went back in for it and dragged it out. Obviously, she could not carry it with her, so she unthinkingly plunged her symbol of livelihood into the receptacle which for weeks had been her symbol of safety—the cement tank of water in front of her house, of the type every household had been ordered to construct against a possible fire raid.
A nervous neighbor, Mrs. Hataya, called to Mrs. Nakamura to run away with her to the woods in Asano Park—an estate, by the Kyo River not far off, belonging to the wealthy Asano family, who once owned the Toyo Kisen Kaisha steamship line. The park had been designated as an evacuation area for their neighborhood. Seeing fire breaking out in a nearby ruin (except at the very center, where the bomb itself ignited some fires, most of Hiroshima’s citywide conflagration was caused by inflammable wreckage falling on cookstoves and live wires), Mrs. Nakamura suggested going over to fight it. Mrs. Hataya said, “Don’t be foolish. What if planes come and drop more bombs?” So Mrs. Nakamura started out for Asano Park with her children and Mrs. Hataya, and she carried her rucksack of emergency clothing, a blanket, an umbrella, and a suitcase of things she had cached in her air-raid shelter. Under many ruins, as they hurried along, they heard muffled screams for help. The only building they saw standing on their way to Asano Park was the Jesuit mission house, alongside the Catholic kindergarten to which Mrs. Nakamura had sent Myeko for a time. As they passed it, she saw Father Kleinsorge, in bloody underwear, running out of the house with a small suitcase in his hand.
Right after the
explosion, while Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, S. J., was wandering around
in his underwear in the vegetable garden, Father Superior LaSalle came
around the corner of the building in the darkness. His body, especially
his back, was bloody; the flash had made him twist away from his window,
and tiny pieces of glass had flown at him. Father Kleinsorge, still
bewildered, managed to ask, “Where are the rest?” Just then, the two
other priests living in the mission house appeared—Father Cieslik,
unhurt, supporting Father Schiffer, who was covered with blood that
spurted from a cut above his left ear and who was very pale. Father
Cieslik was rather pleased with himself, for after the flash he had
dived into a doorway, which he had previously reckoned to be the safest
place inside the building, and when the blast came, he was not injured.
Father LaSalle told Father Cieslik to take Father Schiffer to a doctor
before he bled to death, and suggested either Dr. Kanda, who lived on
the next corner, or Dr. Fujii, about six blocks away. The two men went
out of the compound and up the street.
A public bath next door to the mission house had caught fire, but since there the wind was southerly, the priests thought their house would be spared. Nevertheless, as a precaution, Father Kleinsorge went inside to fetch some things he wanted to save. He found his room in a state of weird and illogical confusion. A first-aid kit was hanging undisturbed on a hook on the wall, but his clothes, which had been on other hooks nearby, were nowhere to be seen. His desk was in splinters all over the room, but a mere papier-mâché suitcase, which he had hidden under the desk, stood handle-side up, without a scratch on it, in the doorway of the room, where he could not miss it. Father Kleinsorge later came to regard this as a bit of Providential interference, inasmuch as the suitcase contained his breviary, the account books for the whole diocese, and a considerable amount of paper money belonging to the mission, for which he was responsible. He ran out of the house and deposited the suitcase in the mission air-raid shelter.
At about this time, Father Cieslik and Father Schiffer, who was still spurting blood, came back and said that Dr. Kanda’s house was ruined and that fire blocked them from getting out of what they supposed to be the local circle of destruction to Dr. Fujii’s private hospital, on the bank of the Kyo River.
Dr.
Masakazu Fujii’s hospital was no longer on the bank of the Kyo River; it
was in the river. After the overturn, Dr. Fujii was so stupefied and so
tightly squeezed by the beams gripping his chest that he was unable to
move at first, and he hung there about twenty minutes in the darkened
morning. Then a thought which came to him—that soon the tide would be
running in through the estuaries and his head would be
submerged—inspired him to fearful activity; he wriggled and turned and
exerted what strength he could (though his left arm, because of the pain
in his shoulder, was useless), and before long he had freed himself
from the vise. After a few moments’ rest, he climbed onto the pile of
timbers and, finding a long one that slanted up to the riverbank, he
painfully shinnied up it.
Dr. Machii said, “It must have been a Molotoffano hanakago”—a Molotov flower basket, the delicate Japanese name for the “bread basket,” or self-scattering cluster of bombs.
At first, Dr. Fujii could see only two fires, one across the river from his hospital site and one quite far to the south. But at the same time, he and his friend observed something that puzzled them, and which, as doctors, they discussed: although there were as yet very few fires, wounded people were hurrying across the bridge in an endless parade of misery, and many of them exhibited terrible burns on their faces and arms. “Why do you suppose it is?” Dr. Fujii asked. Even a theory was comforting that day, and Dr. Machii stuck to his. “Perhaps because it was a Molotov flower basket,” he said.
There had been no breeze earlier in the morning when Dr. Fujii had walked to the railway station to see a friend off, but now brisk winds were blowing every which way; here on the bridge the wind was easterly. New fires were leaping up, and they spread quickly, and in a very short time terrible blasts of hot air and showers of cinders made it impossible to stand on the bridge any more. Dr. Machii ran to the far side of the river and along a still unkindled street. Dr. Fujii went down into the water under the bridge, where a score of people had already taken refuge, among them his servants, who had extricated themselves from the wreckage. From there, Dr. Fujii saw a nurse hanging in the timbers of his hospital by her legs, and then another painfully pinned across the breast. He enlisted the help of some of the others under the bridge and freed both of them. He thought he heard the voice of his niece for a moment, but he could not find her; he never saw her again. Four of his nurses and the two patients in the hospital died, too. Dr. Fujii went back into the water of the river and waited for the fire to subside.
T
he lot of Drs. Fujii, Kanda, and Machii right after the explosion—and,
as these three were typical, that of the majority of the physicians and
surgeons of Hiroshima—with their offices and hospitals destroyed, their
equipment scattered, their own bodies incapacitated in varying degrees,
explained why so many citizens who were hurt went untended and why so
many who might have lived died. Of a hundred and fifty doctors in the
city, sixty-five were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of
1,780 nurses, 1,654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. In the biggest
hospital, that of the Red Cross, only six doctors out of thirty were
able to function, and only ten nurses out of more than two hundred. The
sole uninjured doctor on the Red Cross Hospital staff was Dr. Sasaki.
After the explosion, he hurried to a storeroom to fetch bandages. This
room, like everything he had seen as he ran through the hospital, was
chaotic—bottles of medicines thrown off shelves and broken, salves
spattered on the walls, instruments strewn everywhere. He grabbed up
some bandages and an unbroken bottle of mercurochrome, hurried back to
the chief surgeon, and bandaged his cuts. Then he went out into the
corridor and began patching up the wounded patients and the doctors and
nurses there. He blundered so without his glasses that he took a pair
off the face of a wounded nurse, and although they only approximately
compensated for the errors of his vision, they were better than nothing.
(He was to depend on them for more than a month.)
S
ome of the wounded in Hiroshima were unable to enjoy the questionable
luxury of hospitalization. In what had been the personnel office of the
East Asia Tin Works, Miss Sasaki lay doubled over, unconscious, under
the tremendous pile of books and plaster and wood and corrugated iron.
She was wholly unconscious (she later estimated) for about three hours.
Her first sensation was of dreadful pain in her left leg. It was so
black under the books and debris that the borderline between awareness
and unconsciousness was fine; she apparently crossed it several times,
for the pain seemed to come and go. At the moments when it was sharpest,
she felt that her leg had been cut off somewhere below the knee. Later,
she heard someone walking on top of the wreckage above her, and
anguished voices spoke up, evidently from within the mess around her:
“Please help! Get us out!”
Father
Kleinsorge stemmed Father Schiffer’s spurting cut as well as he could
with some bandage that Dr. Fujii had given the priests a few days
before. When he finished, he ran into the mission house again and found
the jacket of his military uniform and an old pair of gray trousers. He
put them on and went outside. A woman from next door ran up to him and
shouted that her husband was buried under her house and the house was on
fire; Father Kleinsorge must come and save him.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “Come quickly.”
They went around to the house, the remains of which blazed violently, but when they got there, it turned out that the woman had no idea where her husband was. Father Kleinsorge shouted several times, “Is there anyone there?” There was no answer. Father Kleinsorge said to the woman, “We must get away or we will all die.” He went back to the Catholic compound and told the Father Superior that the fire was coming closer on the wind, which had swung around and was now from the north; it was time for everybody to go.
Just then, the kindergarten teacher pointed out to the priests Mr. Fukai, the secretary of the diocese, who was standing in his window on the second floor of the mission house, facing in the direction of the explosion, weeping. Father Cieslik, because he thought the stairs unusable, ran around to the back of the mission house to look for a ladder. There he heard people crying for help under a nearby fallen roof. He called to passersby running away in the street to help him lift it, but nobody paid any attention, and he had to leave the buried ones to die. Father Kleinsorge ran inside the mission house and scrambled up the stairs, which were awry and piled with plaster and lathing, and called to Mr. Fukai from the doorway of his room.
Mr. Fukai, a very short man of about fifty, turned around slowly, with a queer look, and said, “Leave me here.”
Father Kleinsorge went into the room and took Mr. Fukai by the collar of his coat and said, “Come with me or you’ll die.”
Mr. Fukai said, “Leave me here to die.”
Father Kleinsorge began to shove and haul Mr. Fukai out of the room. Then the theological student came up and grabbed Mr. Fukai’ s feet, and Father Kleinsorge took his shoulders, and together they carried him downstairs and outdoors. “I can’t walk!” Mr. Fukai cried. “Leave me here!” Father Kleinsorge got his paper suitcase with the money in it and took Mr. Fukai up pickaback, and the party started for the East Parade Ground, their district’s “safe area.” As they went out of the gate, Mr. Fukai, quite childlike now, beat on Father Kleinsorge’s shoulders and said, “I won’t leave. I won’t leave.” Irrelevantly, Father Kleinsorge turned to Father LaSalle and said, “We have lost all our possessions but not our sense of humor.”
The street was cluttered with parts of houses that had slid into it, and with fallen telephone poles and wires. From every second or third house came the voices of people buried and abandoned, who invariably screamed, with formal politeness, “Tasukete kure! Help, if you please!” The priests recognized several ruins from which these cries came as the homes of friends, but because of the fire it was too late to help. All the way, Mr. Fukai whimpered, “Let me stay.” The party turned right when they came to a block of fallen houses that was one flame. At Sakai Bridge, which would take them across to the East Parade Ground, they saw that the whole community on the opposite side of the river was a sheet of fire; they dared not cross and decided to take refuge in Asano Park, off to their left. Father Kleinsorge, who had been weakened for a couple of days by his bad case of diarrhea, began to stagger under his protesting burden, and as he tried to climb up over the wreckage of several houses that blocked their way to the park, he stumbled, dropped Mr. Fukai, and plunged down, head over heels, to the edge of the river. When he picked himself up, he saw Mr. Fukai running away. Father Kleinsorge shouted to a dozen soldiers, who were standing by the bridge, to stop him. As Father Kleinsorge started back to get Mr. Fukai, Father LaSalle called out, “Hurry! Don’t waste time!” So Father Kleinsorge just requested the soldiers to take care of Mr. Fukai. They said they would, but the little, broken man got away from them, and the last the priests could see of him, he was running back toward the fire.
Mr.
Tanimoto, fearful for his family and church, at first ran toward them
by the shortest route, along Koi Highway. He was the only person making
his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing,
and everyone of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some
were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others,
because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both
hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds
of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of
undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since
white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and
conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their
kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were
worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead,
were silent, and showed no expression whatever.
He thought he would skirt the fire, to the left. He ran back to Kannon Bridge and followed for a distance one of the rivers. He tried several cross streets, but all were blocked, so he turned far left and ran out to Yokogawa, a station on a railroad line that detoured the city in a wide semicircle, and he followed the rails until he came to a burning train. So impressed was he by this time by the extent of the damage that he ran north two miles to Gion, a suburb in the foothills. All the way, he overtook dreadfully burned and lacerated people, and in his guilt he turned to right and left as he hurried and said to some of them, “Excuse me for having no burden like yours.” Near Gion, he began to meet country people going toward the city to help, and when they saw him, several exclaimed, “Look! There is one who is not wounded.” At Gion, he bore toward the right bank of the main river, the Ota, and ran down it until he reached fire again. There was no fire on the other side of the river, so he threw off his shirt and shoes and plunged into it. In midstream, where the current was fairly strong, exhaustion and fear finally caught up with him—he had run nearly seven miles—and he became limp and drifted in the water. He prayed, “Please, God, help me to cross. It would be nonsense for me to be drowned when I am the only uninjured one.” He managed a few more strokes and fetched up on a spit downstream.
Mr. Tanimoto climbed up the bank and ran along it until, near a large Shinto shrine, he came to more fire, and as he turned left to get around it, he met, by incredible luck, his wife. She was carrying their infant son. Mr. Tanimoto was now so emotionally worn out that nothing could surprise him. He did not embrace his wife; he simply said, “Oh, you are safe.” She told him that she had got home from her night in Ushida just in time for the explosion; she had been buried under the parsonage with the baby in her arms. She told how the wreckage had pressed down on her, how the baby had cried. She saw a chink of light, and by reaching up with a hand, she worked the hole bigger, bit by bit. After about half an hour, she heard the crackling noise of wood burning. At last the opening was big enough for her to push the baby out, and afterward she crawled out herself. She said she was now going out to Ushida again. Mr. Tanimoto said he wanted to see his church and take care of the people of his Neighborhood Association. They parted as casually—as bewildered—as they had met.
Mr. Tanimoto’s way around the fire took him across the East Parade Ground, which, being an evacuation area, was now the scene of a gruesome review: rank on rank of the burned and bleeding. Those who were burned moaned, “Mizu, mizu! Water, water!” Mr. Tanimoto found a basin in a nearby street and located a water tap that still worked in the crushed shell of a house, and he began carrying water to the suffering strangers. When he had given drink to about thirty of them, he realized he was taking too much time. “Excuse me,” he said loudly to those nearby who were reaching out their hands to him and crying their thirst. “I have many people to take care of.” Then he ran away. He went to the river again, the basin in his hand, and jumped down onto a sandspit. There he saw hundreds of people so badly wounded that they could not get up to go farther from the burning city. When they saw a man erect and unhurt, the chant began again: “Mizu, mizu, mizu.” Mr. Tanimoto could not resist them; he carried them water from the river—a mistake, since it was tidal and brackish. Two or three small boats were ferrying hurt people across the river from Asano Park, and when one touched the spit, Mr. Tanimoto again made his loud, apologetic speech and jumped into the boat. It took him across to the park. There, in the underbrush, he found some of his charges of the Neighborhood Association, who had come there by his previous instructions, and saw many acquaintances, among them Father Kleinsorge and the other Catholics. But he missed Fukai, who had been a close friend. “Where is Fukai-san?” he asked.
“He didn’t want to come with us, Father Kleinsorge said. “He ran back.”
W
hen Miss Sasaki heard the voices of the people caught along with her in
the dilapidation at the tin factory, she began speaking to them. Her
nearest neighbor, she discovered, was a high-school girl who had been
drafted for factory work, and who said her back was broken. Miss Sasaki
replied, “I am lying here and I can’t move. My left leg is cut off.”
The man was gone a long time, and when he came back, he was ill-tempered, as if her plight were all her fault. “We have no men to help you!” he shouted in through the tunnel. “You’ll have to get out by yourself.”
“That’s impossible,” she said. “My left leg . . .” The man went away.
Much later, several men came and dragged Miss Sasaki out. Her left leg was not severed, but it was badly broken and cut and it hung askew below the knee. They took her out into a courtyard. It was raining. She sat on the ground in the rain. When the downpour increased, someone directed all the wounded people to take cover in the factory’s air-raid shelters. “Come along,” a torn-up woman said to her. “You can hop.” But Miss Sasaki could not move, and she just waited in the rain. Then a man propped up a large sheet of corrugated iron as a kind of lean-to, and took her in his arms and carried her to it. She was grateful until he brought two horribly wounded people—a woman with a whole breast sheared off and a man whose face was all raw from a burn—to share the simple shed with her. No one came back. The rain cleared and the cloudy afternoon was hot; before nightfall the three grotesques under the slanting piece of twisted iron began to smell quite bad.
The
former head of the Nobori-cho Neighborhood Association, to which the
Catholic priests belonged, was an energetic man named Yoshida. He had
boasted, when he was in charge of the district air-raid defenses, that
fire might eat away all of Hiroshima but it would never come to
Nobori-cho. The bomb blew down his house, and a joist pinned him by the
legs, in full view of the Jesuit mission house across the way and of the
people hurrying along the street. In their confusion as they hurried
past, Mrs. Nakamura, with her children, and Father Kleinsorge, with Mr.
Fukai on his back, hardly saw him; he was just part of the general blur
of misery through which they moved. His cries for help brought no
response from them; there were so many people shouting for help that
they could not hear him separately. They and all the others went along.
Nobori-cho became absolutely deserted, and the fire swept through it.
Mr. Yoshida saw the wooden mission house—the only erect building in the
area—go up in a lick of flame, and the heat was terrific on his face.
Then flames came along his side of the street and entered his house. In a
paroxysm of terrified strength, he freed himself and ran down the
alleys of Nobori-cho, hemmed in by the fire he had said would never
come. He began at once to behave like an old man; two months later his
hair was white.
As
Dr. Fujii stood in the river up to his neck to avoid the heat of the
fire, the wind grew stronger and stronger, and soon, even though the
expanse of water was small, the waves grew so high that the people under
the bridge could no longer keep their footing. Dr. Fujii went close to
the shore, crouched down, and embraced a large stone with his usable
arm. Later it became possible to wade along the very edge of the river,
and Dr. Fujii and his two surviving nurses moved about two hundred yards
upstream, to a sandspit near Asano Park. Many wounded were lying on the
sand. Dr. Machii was there with his family; his daughter, who had been
outdoors when the bomb burst, was badly burned on her hands and legs but
fortunately not on her face. Although Dr. Fujii’s shoulder was by now
terribly painful, he examined the girl’s burns curiously. Then he lay
down. In spite of the misery all around, he was ashamed of his
appearance, and he remarked to Dr. Machii that he looked like a beggar,
dressed as he was in nothing but torn and bloody underwear. Late in the
afternoon, when the fire began to subside, he decided to go to his
parental house, in the suburb of Nagatsuka. He asked Dr. Machii to join
him, but the Doctor answered that he and his family were going to spend
the night on the spit, because of his daughter’s injuries. Dr. Fujii,
together with his nurses, walked first to Ushida, where, in the
partially damaged house of some relatives, he found first-aid materials
he had stored there. The two nurses bandaged him and he them. They went
on. Now not many people walked in the streets, but a great number sat
and lay on the pavement, vomited, waited for death, and died. The number
of corpses on the way to Nagatsuka was more and more puzzling. The
Doctor wondered: Could a Molotov flower basket have done all this?
All day, people
poured into Asano Park. This private estate was far enough away from the
explosion so that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still
alive, and the green place invited refugees—partly because they believed
that if the Americans came back, they would bomb only buildings; partly
because the foliage seemed a center of coolness and life, and the
estate’s exquisitely precise rock gardens, with their quiet pools and
arching bridges, were very Japanese, normal, secure; and also partly
(according to some who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic
urge to hide under leaves. Mrs. Nakamura and her children were among
the first to arrive, and they settled in the bamboo grove near the
river. They all felt terribly thirsty, and they drank from the river. At
once they were nauseated and began vomiting, and they retched the whole
day. Others were also nauseated; they all thought (probably because of
the strong odor of ionization, an “electric smell” given off by the
bomb’s fission) that they were sick from a gas the Americans had
dropped. When Father Kleinsorge and the other priests came into the
park, nodding to their friends as they passed, the Nakamuras were all
sick and prostrate. A woman named Iwasaki, who lived in the neighborhood
of the mission and who was sitting near the Nakamuras, got up and asked
the priests if she should stay where she was or go with them. Father
Kleinsorge said, “I hardly know where the safest place is.” She stayed
there, and later in the day, though she had no visible wounds or burns,
she died. The priests went farther along the river and settled down in
some underbrush. Father LaSalle lay down and went right to sleep. The
theological student, who was wearing slippers, had carried with him a
bundle of clothes, in which he had packed two pairs of leather shoes.
When he sat down with the others, he found that the bundle had broken
open and a couple of shoes had fallen out and now he had only two lefts.
He retraced his steps and found one right. When he rejoined the
priests, he said, “It’s funny, but things don’t matter any more.
Yesterday, my shoes were my most important possessions. Today, I don’t
care. One pair is enough.”
When Mr. Tanimoto, with his basin still in his hand, reached the park, it was very crowded, and to distinguish the living from the dead was not easy, for most of the people lay still, with their eyes open. To Father Kleinsorge, an Occidental, the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience. The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke. And when Father Kleinsorge gave water to some whose faces had been almost blotted out by flash burns, they took their share and then raised themselves a little and bowed to him, in thanks.
Mr. Tanimoto greeted the priests and then looked around for other friends. He saw Mrs. Matsumoto, wife of the director of the Methodist School, and asked her if she was thirsty. She was, so he went to one of the pools in the Asanos’ rock gardens and got water for her in his basin. Then he decided to try to get back to his church. He went into Nobori-cho by the way the priests had taken as they escaped, but he did not get far; the fire along the streets was so fierce that he had to turn back. He walked to the riverbank and began to look for a boat in which he might carry some of the most severely injured across the river from Asano Park and away from the spreading fire. Soon he found a good-sized pleasure punt drawn up on the bank, but in and around it was an awful tableau—five dead men, nearly naked, badly burned, who must have expired more or less all at once, for they were in attitudes which suggested that they had been working together to push the boat down into the river. Mr. Tanimoto lifted them away from the boat, and as he did so, he experienced such horror at disturbing the dead—preventing them, he momentarily felt, from launching their craft and going on their ghostly way—that he said out loud, “Please forgive me for taking this boat. I must use it for others, who are alive.” The punt was heavy, but he managed to slide it into the water. There were no oars, and all he could find for propulsion was a thick bamboo pole. He worked the boat upstream to the most crowded part of the park and began to ferry the wounded. He could pack ten or twelve into the boat for each crossing, but as the river was too deep in the center to pole his way across, he had to paddle with the bamboo, and consequently each trip took a very long time. He worked several hours that way.
Early in the afternoon, the fire swept into the woods of Asano Park. The first Mr. Tanimoto knew of it was when, returning in his boat, he saw that a great number of people had moved toward the riverside. On touching the bank, he went up to investigate, and when he saw the fire, he shouted, “All the young men who are not badly hurt come with me!” Father Kleinsorge moved Father Schiffer and Father LaSalle close to the edge of the river and asked people there to get them across if the fire came too near, and then joined Tanimoto’s volunteers. Mr. Tanimoto sent some to look for buckets and basins and told others to beat the burning underbrush with their clothes; when utensils were at hand, he formed a bucket chain from one of the pools in the rock gardens. The team fought the fire for more than two hours, and gradually defeated the flames. As Mr. Tanimoto’s men worked, the frightened people in the park pressed closer and closer to the river, and finally the mob began to force some of the unfortunates who were on the very bank into the water. Among those driven into the river and drowned were Mrs. Matsumoto, of the Methodist School, and her daughter.
When Father Kleinsorge got back after fighting the fire, he found Father Schiffer still bleeding and terribly pale. Some Japanese stood around and stared at him, and Father Schiffer whispered, with a weak smile, “It is as if I were already dead.” “Not yet,” Father Kleinsorge said. He had brought Dr. Fujii’s first-aid kit with him, and he had noticed Dr. Kanda in the crowd, so he sought him out and asked him if he would dress Father Schiffer’s bad cuts. Dr. Kanda had seen his wife and daughter dead in the ruins of his hospital; he sat now with his head in his hands. “I can’t do anything,” he said. Father Kleinsorge bound more bandage around Father Schiffer’s head, moved him to a steep place, and settled him so that his head was high, and soon the bleeding diminished.
The roar of approaching planes was heard about this time. Someone in the crowd near the Nakamura family shouted, “It’s some Grummans coming to strafe us!” A baker named Nakashima stood up and commanded, “Everyone who is wearing anything white, take it off.” Mrs. Nakamura took the blouses off her children, and opened her umbrella and made them get under it. A great number of people, even badly burned ones, crawled into bushes and stayed there until the hum, evidently of a reconnaissance or weather run, died away.
It began to rain. Mrs. Nakamura kept her children under the umbrella. The drops grew abnormally large, and someone shouted, “The Americans are dropping gasoline. They’re going to set fire to us!” (This alarm stemmed from one of the theories being passed through the park as to why so much of Hiroshima had burned: it was that a single plane had sprayed gasoline on the city and then somehow set fire to it in one flashing moment.) But the drops were palpably water, and as they fell, the wind grew stronger and stronger, and suddenly—probably because of the tremendous convection set up by the blazing city—a whirlwind ripped through the park. Huge trees crashed down; small ones were uprooted and flew into the air. Higher, a wild array of flat things revolved in the twisting funnel—pieces of iron roofing, papers, doors, strips of matting. Father Kleinsorge put a piece of cloth over Father Schiffer’s eyes, so that the feeble man would not think he was going crazy. The gale blew Mrs. Murata, the mission housekeeper, who was sitting close by the river, down the embankment at a shallow, rocky place, and she came out with her bare feet bloody. The vortex moved out onto the river, where it sucked up a waterspout and eventually spent itself.
After the storm, Mr. Tanimoto began ferrying people again, and Father Kleinsorge asked the theological student to go across and make his way out to the Jesuit Novitiate at Nagatsuka, about three miles from the center of town, and to request the priests there to come with help for Fathers Schiffer and LaSalle. The student got into Mr. Tanimoto’s boat and went off with him. Father Kleinsorge asked Mrs. Nakamura if she would like to go out to Nagatsuka with the priests when they came. She said she had some luggage and her children were sick—they were still vomiting from time to time, and so, for that matter, was she—and therefore she feared she could not. He said he thought the fathers from the Novitiate could come back the next day with a pushcart to get her.
Late in the afternoon, when he went ashore for a while, Mr. Tanimoto, upon whose energy and initiative many had come to depend, heard people begging for food. He consulted Father Kleinsorge, and they decided to go back into town to get some rice from Mr. Tanimoto’s Neighborhood Association shelter and from the mission shelter. Father Cieslik and two or three others went with them. At first, when they got among the rows of prostrate houses, they did not know where they were; the change was too sudden, from a busy city of two hundred and forty-five thousand that morning to a mere pattern of residue in the afternoon. The asphalt of the streets was still so soft and hot from the fires that walking was uncomfortable. They encountered only one person, a woman, who said to them as they passed, “My husband is in those ashes.” At the mission, where Mr. Tanimoto left the party, Father Kleinsorge was dismayed to see the building razed. In the garden, on the way to the shelter, he noticed a pumpkin roasted on the vine. He and Father Cieslik tasted it and it was good. They were surprised at their hunger, and they ate quite a bit. They got out several bags of rice and gathered up several other cooked pumpkins and dug up some potatoes that were nicely baked under the ground, and started back. Mr. Tanimoto rejoined them on the way. One of the people with him had some cooking utensils. In the park, Mr. Tanimoto organized the lightly wounded women of his neighborhood to cook. Father Kleinsorge offered the Nakamura family some pumpkin, and they tried it, but they could not keep it on their stomachs. Altogether, the rice was enough to feed nearly a hundred people.
Just before dark, Mr. Tanimoto came across a twenty-year-old girl, Mrs. Kamai, the Tanimotos’ next-door neighbor. She was crouching on the ground with the body of her infant daughter in her arms. The baby had evidently been dead all day. Mrs. Kamai jumped up when she saw Mr. Tanimoto and said, “Would you please try to locate my husband?”
Mr. Tanimoto knew that her husband had been inducted into the Army just the day before; he and Mrs. Tanimoto had entertained Mrs. Kamai in the afternoon, to make her forget. Kamai had reported to the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters—near the ancient castle in the middle of town—where some four thousand troops were stationed. Judging by the many maimed soldiers Mr. Tanimoto had seen during the day, he surmised that the barracks had been badly damaged by whatever it was that had hit Hiroshima. He knew he hadn’t a chance of finding Mrs. Kamai’s husband, even if he searched, but he wanted to humor her. “I’ll try,” he said.
“You’ve got to find him,” she said. “He loved our baby so much. I want him to see her once more.”
