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took off my parachute and placed it on the floor in front of the door to kneel on because the window in the door was too high to properly position the K-20 aerial camera.

Hiroshima had been the target of the first atomic bomb, a uranium gun type called "Little Boy", on 6 August, 1945. My photographs clearly show the two mile diameter circle of maximum destruction where 100,000 people were incinerated instantly by the searing one hundred million degree heat, and the six mile diameter circle of radiation which continued to kill as many as 100,000 more people over a period of many years. We had miscalculated the area of radiation. In later years Norman F. Ramsey who had been the senior scientist of the bomb design group explained: "The people who made the decision to drop the bomb made it on the assumption that all casualties would be standard explosion casualties...The region over which there would have been radiation injury was to be much smaller than the region of so-called 100% blast kill...Any person with radiation damage would have been killed with a brick first."

It was a bumpy ride but things were going OK until I took picture number forty-one of the moat where the old castle had stood. We were at about 800 feet (the length of two city blocks) above the ground when we hit a severe downdraft. ^[[*]] The left wing flipped down and I found myself with my back pinned to the ceiling on the opposite side of the plane. Then I went weightless and rotated, floating with my back down toward the door. When we hit the up draft I slammed into the door backwards, my elbow hit the door handle, and I saw daylight above my head as the door popped open several inches. As quickly as it had opened, it slammed shut knocking me across the plane. I was holding on to the camera with both hands. It was over in seconds although it went by in slow motion for me and seemed like at least a minute. We had fallen about 200 feet! The co-pilot, knowing that I was not strapped in, had turned around in time to see me floating and banging the door open. He informed the pilot who told me to buckle up and said, "Let's go home!". ^[[* We now know it was windshear.]]

He spent quite a bit of time circling over the city to gain altitude before we headed back over the mountains. The flight back was very bumpy and the engine sounded like it was laboring. Clouds had rolled in and there were more downdrafts than up thermals. I noticed that we seemed to be getting a lot closer to the mountain tops but we finally made it to the coastline of Kyushu and back to the air base. After we landed, the pilot told us that it was the roughest flight that he ever had, and because we lacked that 50 H.P. we almost went down in the mountains. I never flew in that plane again and I doubt that he did either.

When I wasn't photographing a wide variety of assignments, developing film, or printing pictures on the job, there were many other things to do and places to go. Most of the personnel were limited to travel only short distances. As photographers, we had

^[[7.]]