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August, 1945. Although the city was dissected by seven tributaries of the wide Ota river flowing from the north which would act as firebreaks, the wood and paper houses were closely packed and all would spread fires. Therefore the city fathers evacuated 50,000 people out of the city and tore down 70,000 buildings creating three wide east-west bands of bare ground to act as additional firebreaks during the inevitable coming air raids. Japan had been divided into two Army commands. The first was in Tokyo and the newly created Second General Army covered all of southern Japan from Hiroshimas headquarters in the old castle to the north, the communications hospital a few block northeast of the old castle, the East Drill Field on the northeast corner (north of the railyards) of the city, and the harbor installations to the south.

Large waves of immigrants had left Hiroshima for the United States beginning in 1899 and thousands of families had relatives there. A large group of Koreans and some Americans were also residing in Hiroshima. Homes had become factories making parts for bombs, shells, and Kamikaze planes while hospital patients and the disabled made booby traps to fight the Americans on the beaches.

We slowly rolled into the huge rail yard on the northeast corner of Hiroshima. We knew very little about the atomic bomb at that time except for the fact that a single bomb had killed thousands of people. We creaked to a halt opposite a station platform where a number of grim-faced people were standing. One boy in particular stood out. He was a teen ager with red hair and combined Japanese/American features, a reminder that some of our people had long-standing connections with the Japanese. No one spoke, they just stared expressionless at our small group of Army Air Corps Americans. On the opposite side (north) of our train was the rusting hulk of a steam locomotive buried cab down with the front end, about half of its length, sticking out of the ground almost perpendicular. How could this be - why wasn't that engine just blown over on its side? Where was the crater that would surely be created by such a powerful bomb? We would not know for several years that Little Boy, the first atomic bomb was dropped from over 30,000 feet and intentionally detonated at an altitude of 1,800 feet above the center of the city. An explosive force equivalent to thirteen kilotons of TNT had pushed downward on that locomotive, pushing the cab deep into the ground. Around three dozen reinforced concrete buildings that were still standing were irrepairably cracked and some near the hypocenter (the point under which a nuclear blast occurs) were driven into the ground as much as two feet.

Our train was parked on a siding that was almost exactly one mile from the hypocenter and the tracks had followed an arc of about one third of a circle around the north side of the city. The blast had destroyed much of those tracks and a very temporary single track had been laid on an unstable roadbed. Trains could only creep along that stretch of track. Because many trains were

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