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^[[from "The Bulletin", Whitley County Historical Society VOL. 33, June, 1995 NO. 2]]

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 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 a much smaller one 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 down draft. 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 still 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."

He spend 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 had 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.

After those two missions I photographed quite a few other bombed out cities from low altitudes. In contrast to the mile wide area of total destruction that I saw in the two atom bomb cities, other cities had irregular shaped spots - some cleaned out by blasts - others burned out by fire bombs. This was the result of selective targets - docks in one area -

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factories in another area - military facilities in another. Tokyo had been hardest hit with an area of sixteen square miles burned out with magnesium fire bombs.

The fire bombings had extracted a terrible price from thousands of Japanese civilians and military personnel alike. I believe that the use of atomic bombs broke a stalemate within the Japanese Supreme Council for the direction of the war and ended the war early. As I flew out of Atsugi, headed for the United States on 9 August, 1946, I believed that the U. S. possession of atomic bombs would deter any future wars. Little did I know that Klaus Fuchs had passed almost total atom bomb design details to Russia through Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. This coupled with the capture and deportation to Russia of the German A-bomb team at the end of the war in Europe enabled Russia to have the A-bomb by 1949, which was the start of the cold war.

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^[[This narrative is also a part of the records at The National Atomic Museum, Motts Military Museum, and The Bradbury Museum, Los Alamos, N.M.]]

[[image - black & white photograph of William Jones in United States Air Force uniform]]
^[[3/16/46]]

[[image - black & white photograph of William Jones in United States Air Force uniform holding camera]]
^[[4/7/46]]

[[image - black & white photograph of various military airplanes]]
[[caption]]Our Stinson L-5's and Noorduyn Norseman C-64's[[/caption]]

Transcription Notes:
mandc: This essay is helpful in interpreting the damage photos on scans 100-101 and200-202.