Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [208]
In the Edogawa district, sixteen-year-old Ryoichi Sekine stood with his father and cousin watching the reddening sky in the west, listening to the thunder of bomb explosions, anti-aircraft fire and the rising wind. Ryoichi sought shelter as shrapnel fragments began to fall among them. Then fireballs were added, blazing embers and fragments that struck houses, held, and spread fire in seconds. The heat was growing. Instinctively, they ducked as a B-29 flew overhead so low that they could see flame reflections flickering on its silver underbelly. So fierce was the gale that it began to blow gravel across the road, checking the progress of anyone attempting to run against it. The fires were gaining ground fast, and it became plain that the Sekines must join the surging mob of fleeing people. Those in the worst case were the old, and mothers with children. Ryoichi’s father, with rare presence of mind, gave an improvised banner to his young niece Takako Ohki, telling her to use it to lead all the mothers and old people she could find towards safety. The girl set off, holding aloft her emblem, followed by a column of fugitives.
Mr. Sekine, his son and a friend began a hasty tour of neighbouring houses, to ensure that everyone had got out. By the time they finished their check, not only was the path taken by the mothers and old people blocked by flames, but it had become impossible to stand upright in the gale of smoke. Choking and gasping, the three men crawled westward until they reached an open space, already burnt out. They saw corpses everywhere, the living frenziedly beating at flames on their own bodies. In the Naka River corpses floated in dense clusters, some obviously killed by flaming debris. The two Sekines struggled on towards a cluster of trees, which they recognised as the approach to the Suwa Shrine. Hundreds of people, dead and alive, lay in the shallow lake nearby. Corpses in the water did nothing to deter the living, in their desperation, from drinking and splashing their own scorched bodies.
Until the moment Yoshiko Hashimoto jumped into the river, she had been almost comatose with fear and the pain of the intense heat. The water revived her. She saw a tangle of lumber, partly ablaze, floating past. Seizing this with one hand, with the other she managed to push her baby onto the flimsy raft. He lay traumatised into silence as they drifted downstream. Even in the river, the heat was overpowering. Yoshiko ducked her head beneath the surface every few moments to cool her skin, and splashed the baby. Others were likewise struggling in the water, and Yoshiko found herself facing a new peril. Desperate men and women seized the timber, rocking and spinning it as they thrashed.
Yoshiko had been drifting perhaps half an hour when she saw a miraculous sight: a boat, rowed by two men. She cried out to them to take her baby, and with her failing strength pushed Hiroshi over the thwart. The rowers took pity on the mother also. She was dragged on board. They found that they could make little progress downriver, because their passage was blocked by flaming debris. On shore, they could see only a ring of fire. As the first light of dawn appeared, the boatmen lay on their oars and gazed at the stricken city. They and their two passengers were too shocked to speak. They merely wondered at the sight of a sun that looked more like a moon, a sickly yellow disk masked by pillars of smoke which towered over the landscape.
Slowly, very slowly, the heat began to diminish. Everything around Haruyo Wada which was susceptible to fire had succumbed. The first glimmerings of day appeared. Haruyo crawled out from beneath the cluster of humanity which had sheltered her—and found that all were blackened corpses save one, who took her