The Forgotten Highlander - Alistair Urquhart [94]
Then the men came back from the factory and began to talk of a massive raid on Nagasaki and a huge direct hit on the armoury at the naval base. Massive clouds of smoke had been seen. But we had spotted no planes from the camp. Some men claimed to have seen dozens, even hundreds of planes, others none. As usual the camp generated abundant rumours and great speculation. We knew that something big had happened down in Nagasaki.
One Gordon proffered hopefully, ‘They’re bombing the shit out of the place. It’s the final push. We’ll be out of here in a week.’
But the low-flying lone plane attracted equally frenzied speculation. One of the lads suggested, ‘It’s high-ranking American officials, Winston Churchill himself maybe, coming to talk the Nip bastards into surrender.’
I remained less optimistic. There had been so many setbacks that I refused to allow myself to contemplate something as dramatic as the end.
On the hospital rounds Dr Mathieson was puzzled too. ‘Why was there no opposition to those American planes?’ he queried as I shadowed him.
‘Never saw a Jap plane. Neither did anyone else,’ I said, not knowing what to think.
Starved of news in the camp, our imaginations were nothing if not fevered. But none of us could have dreamed up what had happened at Nagasaki. The strange gust that had knocked me over was the hot breath of Fat Man, a nuclear weapon with even more destructive power than its cousin Little Boy. Unknown to us we had entered the atomic age.
Temperatures at ground zero in Nagasaki had flashed to between three thousand and four thousand degrees centigrade. The entire city had been flattened and thirtynine thousand people had been vaporised instantly by this single bomb. The world had changed for ever.
Only the presence of large tracts of water within the city had prevented a fierce firestorm from developing and causing even greater loss of life. The undulating landscape had saved us from the worst of the blast but one of the camps nearby had been hit and six prisoners were killed.
As we finished the rounds Dr Mathieson’s brow furrowed, ‘If this is the end, hypothetically speaking of course, what will the Japs do with us?’
Having seen their appetite for wanton cruelty and death, and knowing their stance on the dishonour of surrender, it was a gut-churning question. Indeed we later learned that the Japanese Emperor had issued strict instructions to murder any POWs on the mainland, should it ever be invaded. Looking back I’m glad not to have known.
I told Mathieson that if the Japanese stormed our camp with the intention of massacring us all, we should fight to the death. Hopeless as our position was, with no weapons or means of fighting back, I wanted to make sure I took a few of the buggers with me.
‘That’s the spirit,’ he replied much too unconvincingly.
For several days it was business as usual. Then on 15 August the men came back from the factory and said that its manager had spoken to a mass meeting of the workforce and broke down crying during his speech. The fifteenth of August, we were told, would be a big day of mourning for Japan. By now we felt sure that the war was over. Finally on 21 August we were paraded and the Japanese commander read out the declaration of the cessation of hostilities that had been called six days earlier.
Gradually the British took over the running of the camp but in the absence of the Japanese our food rations were diminishing rapidly. Leaflets promising imminent food drops came from above but the men were becoming hungry and restless. To appease them and their growling guts the officers allowed