The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [93]
The ninth of August 1945 began like any other boring day in captivity. At dawn we turned out for tenko and the work parties marched out to the factory where our men now slaved. They were quite glad to be under guard. Since the incendiary bombings of Omuta and Nagasaki, Japanese civilians had taken to stoning POWs and there had been several vicious incidents with civilians in the factory. I began my daily chores around the camp prior to reporting to the hospital for orderly duties.
On an air-base thousands of miles away in the Mariana Islands a young US Air Force officer, Captain Charles Sweeney, aged just twenty-five like myself, was beginning a day that would be anything but normal. He and his youthful crew had already undergone a briefing and enjoyed the traditional early morning breakfast before any bombing mission. The chaplain’s prayer had been a little bit more emotional than usual and the escort for Bockscar, his B-29 bomber, carried press men and photographers.
Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima fascist hardliners in the Japanese government still wanted to fight on. Stalin was already ripping apart the Japanese army in Manchuria and the outcome of the war seemed obvious. But the diehards wanted to fight on in the Japanese home islands and among their plans they intended to massacre all allied prisoners of war. ‘Little Boy’ had wiped out Hiroshima and 140,000 of its people but had failed to persuade Japan’s rulers of the hopelessness of their cause.
Now US President Harry Truman decided that another message must be sent. Sweeney’s bomb hold contained just one huge bomb: ‘Fat Man’. Millions of man-hours had gone into designing this implosion-type plutonium bomb. Over ten feet long and five feet in diameter it weighed in at 10,200 pounds and was designed to be burst 1800 feet above its target.
But the initial target for Sweeney and his twenty-fouryear-old co-pilot, First Lieutenant Charles Albury, was not Nagasaki but Kokura, the port city where we had landed in the hellship from Hainan. The young pilots made three passes on Kokura but found it clouded over and were unable to comply with orders to drop the bomb visually if possible. Running low on fuel and fearing they might have to ditch Fat Man in the sea, Sweeney and Albury turned their attention towards nearby Nagasaki. It was covered with cloud too. But suddenly from thirty thousand feet up Bockscar’s twenty-seven-year-old veteran bomb-aimer Kermit Beahan caught a glimpse of the Nagasaki stadium and pressed the button that released the bomb.
It was around midday and I had finally plucked up the courage to undertake my most hateful task. Emptying the latrine cans on to the Japanese officers’ tomato plants always made my stomach turn. But I did have to marvel at the spectacular effect it produced in the plants, which boasted tomatoes the size of apples. Earlier in the morning I had heard the drone of an aeroplane flying overheard. I looked up and saw it was flying quite low – in fact low enough to see its American military markings. I looked up open-mouthed as it flew directly over us. Since March 1945 we had seen growing numbers of American bombers flying above us to pound Japanese targets. Yet I was amazed this plane was flying so low and unchallenged. It made me think for an instant that the war might be over but as it disappeared my optimism went with it. We were unaware that Japan had been plunged into chaos at the top with the dropping three days earlier of Little Boy.
I was taking as much care as possible to avoid being splashed with the revolting contents of the cans as I moved up and down the drills of tomato plants behind the huts. The job always made me gag but was lighter work than the mines and furnaces. Halfway up a drill there came a tremendous clap of thunder from the direction of Nagasaki. I didn’t think too much of it and had just finished watering the plants when a sudden gust of very hot air like a giant hairdryer blasted into me. It knocked my shrunken frame