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HIROSHIMA & NAGASAKI:

A-bomb Destruction Viewed From Above

By former Sgt. William E. Jones, 5th Air Force aerial photographer

I was in Lincoln, Nebraska on 6 August, 1945 transferring from B-24's to the Queen of the Sky," a B-29, when another B-29 the Enola Gay dropped "Little Boy" on Hiroshima. Three days later on 9 August, 1945, Bocks Car dropped "Fat Man" on Nagasaki. I was sent home on a delay-en-route and in December I arrived in Japan for the occupation.

Upon our arrival in Yokohama we went to Irumagawa Air Base northwest of Tokyo. We were issued one blanket and a cot, and a large airplane hangar became our temporary residence for about a week. The hangar was without heat and we about froze the first night. To complicate matters someone stole my blanket and I had to do without the next night. I spotted a cot with two blankets the next day and got it back. The second day we decided to arrange our cots in circles and build fires in the center from scrap wood. It wasn't much warmer and it got so smoky that a couple of guys climbed the steel hangar framework and broke out the windows at the top. Instead of letting the smoke out, the wind forced the smoke down making it worse. Several of us went outside, hollowed out body sized dips in the snow and rolled up in our blankets. With the snow acting as insulation around us it was much warmer than on a canvas cot with cold air circulating underneath.

The mess hall was like bivouac - very crude, but the food was not bad - just average Army fare. When we finished eating we went outdoors to clean our trays. Many shabbily dressed Japanese men with filthy dirty greasy burlap sacks were begging for our leftovers. They would take what little they could get home to feed their families. Some of our guys acted like they were still at war - they would cuss the "Japs" out, jerk their trays away, and slam the leftovers into the garbage drum whereupon the scavengers would reach into the drum with their grubby hands to dip the sloppy mess out. To me the selfishness of some of our Americans was sickening. How could anyone be angry at such desperate people? I was so emotionally moved by their hopelessness that I intentionally left some of my food for them - a slice of bread with butter on it, lots of meat on the bones, mashed potatoes, etc... I wished that I could have done more.

In October and November some of the men who had been down in the island bases moved into Japan to prepare bases for our shipload of troops and many others to come. We were their replacements and each day some of my friends were gone. It was just a couple of days before New Year's

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Day when the rest of us left for Fukouka, the fifth largest city in Japan, on Kyushu, the southernmost island.

We were riding on the 42" gauge track civilian train with sparse accomodationas and most of the passengers were Japanese. They were cordial, polite, and pleasant, and interesting. Many of them spoke some English and it was just enough to communicate. All long the way we found people to be inquisitive and a least somewhat friendly until we came to one city - Hiroshima.

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 teenager 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 32,700 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 the locomotive, pushing the cab deep into the ground. Around three dozen reinforced concrete buildings that were still standing were irreparably cracked and some near the hypocenter (the point ender 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 temporary single track had been laid on a unstable roadbed. Trains could only creep along that stretch of track. Because many trains were waiting on both the west and east ends, we remained parked for three or four hours until it was our turn to go. That is when I began to see the extent of the destruction. Although the debris had been pushed out of the streets almost immediately, the land around the center of the city remained piled with debris. Tar paper shacks had sprung up