them, at about fifteen hundred feet, a burst of flame. Almost instantly the flame, yellow as gaslight, fell in a widening cone to earth, at the same time spreading wider in hoopskirt fashion.
This skirt of flame fell across the bottleneck creek which is a dead end for Nagasaki’s tremendous shipping industry. Nothing human or animal that was above ground there at that moment survived.
As the fiery skirts swept the ground there suddenly burst upward a cumulus cloud of black dust. This cloud climbed high into the sky, visited by a terrible atomic heat erecting a pillar of warning over death’s city. The lieutenant saw this as it began but immediately fell flat on his face, letting the concussion pass over him. When he rose up the parachutes were gone, and Nagasaki was afire.
The lieutenant never saw the atomic bomb or any other in the air, perhaps because its bulk is reportedly small. His theory is that the parachutes were not carrying bombs, but were carrying machinery for controlling the altitude at which a free-dropped bomb would be exploded by its companions.
Dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, after Hiroshima’s bomb, was like hitting Pittsburgh after Detroit. The puff of death quickly scurried up the valleys of hilly Nagasaki. Whereas Hiroshima was a plain, these small hills tossed the blast from crest to crest like a basketball. Winds of terrible force churned about in the valleys, stripped the roofs in many homes and brought the greatest number of dead in houses where they had been sheltered two and three miles from the explosion, in a fashion resembling a hurricane. Roofs fell on weak foundations, burying those beneath.
Nagasaki had had its first air warning only on July 5th and only one earlier serious raid. The so-called “long” or constant warning had been in effect since 7 o’clock but most people had ignored it.
At constabulary headquarters tonight, little Lieutenant Colonel Tokunagawa told the writer that as catalogued up to September 1st, 19,741 deaths had been positively and officially counted, plus 1,927 missing. Wounded requiring treatment number 40,093.
[ends weller]
please acknowledge receipt this story by radio to weller and whoever’s else in tokyo, mcgaffin or thorp.
george weller
Nagasaki, Japan—Friday, September 7, 1945 2400 hours
Two Allied prison camps in Nagasaki harbor number nearly 1,000 men, who have just one question they want answered.
It is: “How does the atomic bomb work?”
They have seen what it does. The Japanese placed one camp amidst the giant Mitsubishi war plants and the other at the entrance to Nagasaki, where it would be impossible for it not to be shelled by any attacking task force.
Seven Dutchmen—including camp leader Lieutenant Kick Aalders of Bandoeng, Java—and one Britisher died from the atomic bomb attack. The writer visited their camp this afternoon as the first outsider in years.
American, British, Dutch and Australians each had their national preoccupations of which I was able to settle the American and British, but failed completely at the Dutch and Australian. Their questions were as follows:
The Aussies, “Who won the Melbourne Cup?” (with Aussies it is always
who
for horses.)
The British, “Is Winnie still in, or did Britain go labor?”
The Dutch, “Is Juliana’s third child a boy heir to the throne, or another girl?”
The Americans, “B-29s dropping us food keep enclosing Saipan newspapers with stuff about some guy named Sinatra. Who is he and what’s his racket?”
Nagasaki, Japan—Saturday, September 8, 1945 0100 hours
The atomic bomb may be classified as a weapon capable of being used indiscriminately, but its use in Nagasaki was selective and proper and as merciful as such a gigantic force could be expected to be.
Such is the conclusion which the writer, as the first visitor from the outside world to inspect the ruins firsthand, has drawn after an