Part 3 Summary
Details Are Being Investigated
In the evening, on the day of the blast, victims near the seven Hiroshima rivers saw a Japanese naval launch. A sailor on the ship, shouting through a megaphone, told the people on the riverbanks that a hospital ship would be coming.
Six members of the Jesuit Novitiate arrived to help get the wounded priests to safety. Mr. Tanimoto helped move the rescuing priests up the river to find a clear roadway on which to transport Fathers LaSalle and Schiffer safely. Father Kleinsorge had now become so weak that they decided not to move him until the next day.
Mr. Tanimoto helped get twenty badly injured people across the river and onto the slope of the riverbank. The work was difficult:
Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly.
He continued to lift these weak, injured people onto his boat for transport.
That night there were ten thousand victims at the Red Cross Hospital. Dr. Sasaki and the other doctors and nurses who could work spent the night treating the worst cuts and burns. Injured people had gathered outside the hospital as well. When he could work no more, Dr. Sasaki tried to get some sleep, but was awakened by some victims and went back to work.
Father Schiffer and Father LaSalle were transported by wooden litter to the outskirts of town, where several other priests were waiting to take them to the Novitiate. The rector of the Novitiate “cleaned the wounds of the two priests and put them to bed between clean sheets, and they thanked God for the care they had received.”
Miss Sasaki spent a very painful, sleepless night with the two other victims under the lean-to. There was no one to help her, and because of the pain in her left leg, she was unable to sleep.
Overnight, one of the city’s gas storage tanks exploded. When Mr. Tanimoto awoke, he saw that the injured people he had moved across the river had drowned in the rising tide.
That day, August 7, the following statement was broadcast by the Japanese government:
Hiroshima suffered considerable damage as the result of an attack by a few B-29s. It is believed that a new type of bomb was used. The details are being investigated.
Mr. Tanimoto went to the East Parade Ground hoping to find a doctor to come help the wounded at Asano Park. When he arrived, a doctor told him that he would not go to Asano Park, because, “this is my station.” When Mr. Tanimoto told him about all the dying people, the doctor said:
In an emergency like this the first task is to help as many as possible—to save as many lives as possible. There is no hope for the heavily wounded. They will die. We can’t bother with them.
Mr. Tanimoto returned to Asano Park without medical help, but he was able to take back some food.
Father Kleinsorge got water for victims from the tap of a destroyed house nearby. During his trips back and forth, he saw many wounded and dying people. At one point, he heard someone from a wooded area ask for water, and when he turned to look he found about twenty uniformed soldiers: "their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks.”
Later, Mrs. Murata and...
(This entire section contains 1256 words.)
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the Nakamuras were taken by the priests in a handcart to the Novitiate in Nagatsuka. Father Kleinsorge went to the police station to enter a claim for compensation for the destroyed mission house.
After spending two days under the lean-to, Miss Sasaki was taken to a relief station in Inokuchi. One of the army doctors said she would die if they did not amputate her leg, which he said had "gas gangrene," but they did not have the equipment for conducting an amputation. She fainted when he touched her leg, and when she awoke, she was being taken to a military hospital in Ninoshima. The doctor there said that she did not have gangrene.
Father Cieslik went back into the city to look for Mr. Fukai, who had run back into the fiery city the day of the blast. He was unable able to find him, and none of the priests ever saw him again.
Several fresh doctors and nurses came to the Red Cross Hospital, along with some supplies. There were now eight doctors for the ten thousand patients. Dr. Sasaki, after working “three straight days with only one hour’s sleep,” was given permission to go see his mother in Mukaihara and let her know he was alive. When he got there, he found that his mother had already been told he was alive. He got into bed and “slept for seventeen hours.”
On August 9, Father Kleinsorge went back into the city. After looking for anything useful at the mission house and finding nothing, “he walked back to the Novitiate, stupefied and without any new understanding.”
At 11:02 that morning, Nagasaki was hit with the second atomic weapon. It would be several days before the Hiroshima survivors would hear about it.
At Asano Park, Mrs. Kamai refused to give up her dead baby. Mr. Tanimoto had been unable to find her husband in the city and knew he never would, but he could not tell Mrs. Kamai that.
Father Kleinsorge heard that Dr. Fujii was at a friend’s house. He sent Father Cieslik to see him. Dr. Fujii and Father Cieslik smoked and drank some whiskey. Dr. Fujii gave Father Cieslik some scissors and tweezers. They talked about the bomb. Father Cieslik said he had heard that the explosion was caused by
a kind of fine magnesium powder sprayed over the whole city by a single plane, and it exploded when it came into contact with the live wires of the city power system.
The hospital in Ninoshima received a large amount of military casualties, so all civilian patients, including Miss Sasaki, were evacuated. Miss Sasaki was put on the deck of a ship. The doctor there could not set the breaks in her leg. The doctor “made an incision and put in a rubber pipe to drain off the putrescence.”
There had been many rumors about what kind of bomb had caused all of the destruction in Hiroshima. Finally, about a week after the blast, the first accurate rumor was heard:
The city had been destroyed by the energy released when atoms were somehow split in two. The weapon was referred to in this word-of-mouth report as "genshi bakudan"—the root characters of which can be translated as "original child bomb."
On August 12 the Nakamuras moved in with Miss Nakamura’s sister-in-law in Kabe.
The Red Cross Hospital was beginning to get the situation under control. They developed better routines for handling the patients, especially the dead and dying. As they cremated the remains of the deceased, they put some of their ashes in envelopes meant for x-ray plates (which were now exposed and useless) and stored them in the main office. “In a few days, the envelopes filled one whole side of the impromptu shrine.”
On August 15, Emperor Tenno spoke over the radio for the first time ever, telling the Japanese people that the war was over.
