Hiroshima Notes

HIROSHIMA NOTES /Henry B. Hager IT WAS 1946, a year after the bombing of Hiroshima. I was a nineteen-year-old sergeant and staff correspondent for the Army newspaper, The Pacific Stars & Stripes, in Tokyo. I was obsessed by Hiroshima. As a fledgling newspaperman, I knew the real story had not yet been told. We had some of the facts but none of the feeUng; no one had reaUy reported on the tragedy in depth. I also had a prep school boy's conscientious sense of history. The bombing of Hiroshima was one of the epochal events in world history, and I wanted to see it for myself. FinaUy—and most importantly—I had a moral question: Couldn't we have dropped the bomb on a rice paddy outside Tokyo instead of on a teeming city? Couldn't we have achieved the same result, the end of the war, without so much human suffering? But Hiroshima was in the British Occupation Zone and, as my commanding officer repeatedly admonished me when I asked for a pass, it was strictly off-limits to Americans. I went anyway. AWOL. Looking back, I wonder at my gaU. I had no idea what might happen when I got there—if I got there. I didn't know where to stay or how I would eat or, more seriously, what kind of reception Td get; the occupation authorities were fearful that the people of Hiroshima, in their resentment of Americans, might attack and kiU us. Nor did I have any concept of the difficulties—not to mention the penalties if I got caught—of sneaking into the British Occupation Zone. I had no idea what specific story I was going for, but was determined to get it—whatever it was. Never mind the fact that I was only a cub at my trade, lacking the expertise and experience for so ambitious an assignment. I had a personal mission. How I got to Hiroshima from Tokyo was Uke something out of an Orient Express thriller: eluding the MPs on the crowded train, ducking into lavatories, crouching behind seats, once even hanging outside the fast-moving train. The normaUy reserved Japanese, deUghted at this unlooked-for opportunity to chaUenge authority, got into the act, hiding me under their newspapers, packages and parasols, crowding around me at times so that I wouldn't be detected by the MPs who pushed through the clogged aisles. One The Missouri Review · 91 old woman, grinning ear to ear, threw a shawl over me. In any case, I made it through and got to Hiroshima late one afternoon. It was at the end of August, almost exactly a year after the bomb. In the Army I had seen the ruins of Mamla, the rubble of Okinawa, and the wastelands of Tokyo, where American fire bombs had razed a third of the city. At first glance from the train, Hiroshima looked Uke more of the same. But the moment I stepped down to the platform, I could sense the difference. In Manila, Okinawa and Tokyo, with the war over, there was the bustle of cars, trucks and bulldozers, energetic rebuUding and, most of aU, people scurrying to and fro, busy, noisy, fuU of Ufe. Not so in Hiroshima. Here, even a year after the shock of the bomb, people shuffled about as if in a daze. No one laughed, cursed, sang or shouted. It was as if noise were some kind of desecration. I have never heard such stiUness. Hiroshima was as quiet as a vast graveyard. The people were scarred. Many faces were splotched, many were wrinkled and glossy from burns. Some people wore eye-patches, some wore hats to conceal their baldness caused by radiation. Others hobbled on crutches. Some had no arms. The devastation in peoples' faces mirrored the ruins of the bufldings and homes. The railroad station was an island in a sea of rubble and ash. The buüding was pitted and blackened on the side that had faced the explosion, four long kUometres away. Whole chunks of the buUding had been torn off; the windows were holes where the panes and sUls had been blown out. I...