Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [195]
At 12:10 p.m. the main batteries of Rear Adm. John F. Shafroth’s task unit thundered out, hammering the coke ovens, hearths, and foundries near the prison camps for two hours. It was the first time that American naval gunfire hit the home islands. Over the next few days the bombardment would be joined by five more U.S. fast battleships, plus a British dreadnought, HMS King George V. Planes from the Third Fleet swarmed northern Honshu and Hokkaido, striking rail yards, harbors, and ground installations.
Jess Stanbrough was working at the power plant in Ohasi when the American sixteen-inch projectiles began raining down on the nearby camp. After the Tokyo fire raids, he had smelled the incinerated pine. When the bombardment of the Kamaishi ironworks started, he heard the low rumble down the coast. The guards explained that the imperial fleet was conducting gunnery practice. Having acquired a Japanese vocabulary of about five hundred words, Stanbrough and the others weren’t fooled by the bid to save face. They had overheard mine workers conversing over morning tea: “Where were our planes?” “Well, we didn’t see any. All we saw was the Americans.” The Japanese always seemed to be talking about the bombers. Like the Allied attacks by air and from under the sea, the bombardment of Kamaishi claimed Allied lives. According to Stanbrough, “There was a lot of people that had been captured down on Wake Island and so forth in that camp that lost their lives. We had some eighteen or nineteen burn victims out of that. They brought them up to our place to try to do something…. Our medical boys—Navy guys—were over there pulling flesh off of them.”
A season of fevered diplomacy was under way as the Allies stepped up pressure on the Japanese to surrender. On July 26, at Potsdam, Germany, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin put forward a final demand for Japan to end the war via unconditional surrender.
The prodigious land, sea and air forces of the United States, the British Empire and of China, many times reinforced by their armies and air fleets from the West, are poised to strike the final blows upon Japan. This military power is sustained and inspired by the determination of all the Allied Nations to prosecute the war against Japan until she ceases to resist…. We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation, but stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners.
The Japanese would invest some hope in the odd absence of reference to the Soviet Union in the Potsdam Declaration. Soon enough, however, what the Soviets were or were not doing would be of secondary significance. On August 6, a B-29 Superfortress with the name Enola Gay stenciled on her fuselage took flight from Tinian and released its epochal payload over the city of Hiroshima. Three days later another atomic device fell on Nagasaki. That same day Admiral Shafroth’s battleships closed with the Japanese mainland and let Kamaishi have it again.
CHAPTER 60
At Tayang, near Phet Buri, Lloyd Willey saw a peculiar cloud move across the sky one day. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, streaked with multiple hues—purple, red, and yellow—and moving, it seemed, with unnatural swiftness. One of the Australian prisoners with him, who had taught at Melbourne University, told him that only a godawful explosion could have produced something so exotic.
A marked change had come over the guards. The Japanese ceased their daily routine of raising their flag and gathering in ceremony to bow to the emperor. One day they just stopped doing it. Willey had premonitions of what lay ahead as he joined a work party digging a six-feet-deep moat east of the airfield. “The Japs were very touchy about that moat. They wanted every side to be perfect…. All the dirt that was piled up, they put machine guns