My latest film, “The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today” has been airing over PBS stations this past month and streaming for free (key links to watch now and more here). A companion book is now available, and you can read more or order here.
The New Yorker magazine this week has a piece about me and my new PBS film, which you can read here. And subscribing to this newsletter is still somehow FREE.
Another excerpt from my new book “The Atomic Bowl” (derived from my current PBS film, see links above). This is kind of a Part II for the one posted a few days back, on the early days of the U.S. occupation of Nagasaki.
October 1945. Catholic leaders in the city told the victims they should accept their fate...because God had chosen Nagasaki to suffer, as a way to end the Pacific war. One of them making this argument was Takashi Nagai, who had lost his wife to the bomb. He would write a book titled The Bells of Nagasaki, which became a bestseller in Japan and also published in America. Because of his selfless relief efforts, he would become known as “The Saint of Nagasaki,” and was visited in the city by everyone from Helen Keller to Emperor Hirohito. He died in 1951 at the age of forty-three from leukemia and other likely effects of the atomic bombing.
There were other bitter consequences for the selectivity of the Nagasaki bomb, however. In Hiroshima, total devastation placed everyone who survived on the same footing. But in Nagasaki, half the city (including the Glover mansion) escaped. While Hiroshima rushed to rebuild, relief efforts in Nagasaki were slowed. “The Urakami suburb had only become a part of the city twenty-five years before,” Shinji Takahashi, a sociologist, told me. “It was new to a city with a very long history. All of the municipal offices were far away and mostly undamaged. So there was an administrative as well as a psychological problem.”
The atomic bomb in Nagasaki was stronger than that of Hiroshima. For example, human hair grew from the wall in the stairway of a concrete school building in Urakami. This showed that the girl was exposed to the atomic bomb on the stairs, and was pressed into the concrete wall. It's been more than two months now, but the girl's hair is still growing on the wall in front of me. A cold chill ran through my body when I saw it. --Takeaki Fujinami, Japanese newsreel cameraman
Some American GIs and Marines were profoundly affected by what they witnessed in the Urakami valley. Few would talk about it later, but Paul Donat, a star high school athlete from New York City, described one haunting image: Finding a single wall still standing in the atomic ruins—with the shadow of a vaporized human burned into it.
I was with a unit that was to be part of the invasion, so we were glad about the atomic bombing. But once you saw what happened there--you wondered how we could do something like that. -- Marine Lt. Walter G. Hooke
The Marines’ barracks were just outside the so-called “Atomic Area” but many service members spent long hours working in the ruins, and drinking the water. Scientists claimed that test results showed that the elevated levels of radioactivity did not pose a serious danger--but few Marines wore badges to detect radiation--or considered them inaccurate and useless.
A marine named Sam Scione, who had survived battles on Guadalcanal, Tarawa and Okinawa, now arrived in Nagasaki, sleeping first in a burned out factory, then a schoolhouse. “We never learned anything about radiation or the effects it might have on us,” he later said. “We went to ground zero many times and were never instructed not to go there.” (A year later, on his return to the U.S., his hair began to fall out and his body was covered in sores. He suffered a string of ailments but never was awarded service-related disability status.)
Troops would soon search for large, rubble-strewn land to convert into athletic fields. One flat spot that drew special attention was found in front of the concrete shell of a middle school in the Urakami valley, less than a mile from the hypocenter of the atomic blast. Thirteen teachers and 162 pupils at the Nagasaki Commercial School had died on the day of the bomb or in the weeks since due to injuries or radiation disease.
“The most wretched were the pupils who had been engaged in digging air raid shelters,” Hirako Shoji, a worker at the school, recalled. “I saw them lying on the ground, calling their parents’ names and begging for water, with their entire bodies burned. I could not help but curse the war that brought such tragedy.”
Bodies had been piled on the field to be burned or retrieved by parents. Rescue workers arriving at the school found the walls covered with blood-stained messages, written to parents by dying students. The only sound was water dripping from a large crack in the concrete ceiling.
Two large athletic fields were soon cleared and graded by military work crews, one of them in front of that middle school.
To be continued…
