EAST MONTPELIER – In August of 1945, my family was living in a modest bungalow near the southwestern outskirts of Syracuse, N.Y. I was ten. My father was a missionary priest and traveled most of New York State north of Oneonta and Corning to visit his scattered parishes. With the recent surrender of Germany to the Allied forces in Europe, we anticipated the return of my father’s brother from the armed forces, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t be reassigned to the Pacific Theater, where the allies were smashing their slow, bloody way, at great expense, toward the Japanese home island of Honshu.
The battle for Tokyo was expected to be fierce. In spite of our elation over V-E day in May, we dreaded the coming battles. Losing Ernie Pyle, everybody’s favorite war correspondent, during the Okinawa campaign in April, seemed darkly ominous. Nevertheless, we were hopeful. The “duration,” our term for the length of the war, seemed at last to have an end in sight.
Meanwhile, about 6,500 miles away in Japan, Hideko, a girl my age, had just returned from work camp in the mountains to the comfort of her grandfather’s estate at the northern edge of Hiroshima. The war was not going well for Japan, but there was little of that in the news, and she knew even less about it, though there was gossip now and then that perhaps, somehow, they might lose it.
On Monday morning, August 6, a bright, sunny day, she was relaxing with a paperback lent her by her cousin Hideyuki. At 7:15 a.m. the air raid sirens sounded, so she turned on the radio to get details. Three enemy planes were approaching. That wasn’t concerning to someone who’d seen dozens, perhaps hundreds, going over at other times, headed for different cities. At 7:30 the radio announced that the enemy planes had turned around, and the danger was past. She resumed reading.
What no one on the ground knew was that, in order that the bombers got as far away as possible from what was coming, the 10-foot-long atomic bomb, “Little Boy.” descended by parachute. No one saw it coming. Not that it would have mattered.
About 8:15 a.m., as Hideko recalls it, the room suddenly was filled with a blinding white light, as if the sun had landed on earth. It was followed immediately by a tremendous boom. The sky turned black. The house trembled, shook and began to fall apart. She sheltered next to a pillar, as her mother had taught her to do in air raids, while the roof rained down tiles around her.
When it got light enough to see, she found herself covered with ash and cinders, with bits of broken glass stuck into her skin, and a larger piece embedded in her right foot. Rubble prevented her from moving. She called out; an aunt answered and came to help her get free. Most of her relatives lay stunned under a tree in the orchard.
She never saw her mother again; she’d been incinerated nearer the center of the blast. But Hideko remembered what her mother had drilled into her: Fire follows the explosions. Get to the river to be safe. She wasn’t able to rouse the rest of the family, or get any help for her wounds. The building across from her home started to burn. So she plucked the glass from her body as well as she could and started for the river.
Here she met crowds of survivors also headed for the water, most of them to try to cool their burning skin, which on many was falling off in sheets. People collapsed all around her, many convulsing and dying without any visible wounds. She describes that horrible day in her memoir, “One Sunny Day” (Hideko Tamura).
She lived through the chaos of the next few years, and eleven years later happened to be a contemporary of mine at a small liberal arts college in central Ohio. She was a beautiful woman (still is, as a matter of fact). We kept company for a while, and she even came to my place in the Adirondacks during the summer for some climbing. But that winter we went separate ways and reconnected only after I read a feature story about her lifelong anti-nuclear weapons campaign (of which more next week).
She’s in Hiroshima this week for the last time, at the invitation of the mayor, to commemorate the day that, as she says, she lost her youth, to remember her missing relatives and friends, and to pray that what happened there will never happen again.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
