Another stream of survivors is heading for Asano Sentei Park. As the fire creeps closer to the park, they, too, decide to go down to the river. Then balls of fire tossed by the wind hit the tops of pine trees in the park and ignite a blaze. Great trees go up in flames, intensifying the heat. Blast winds fan the fires.
On the banks of the river, crowds are getting out of control. Some victims are pushed into the river where it is deep and start drowning. The river itself has become more turbulent, its surface churned up. Hundreds have ended up in the water. Many of them will be carried to their deaths where the current is swift and strong.
After the deafening air-burst explosion and the blast winds and all the destruction, a strange silence begins to spread through the light brown haze of the bomb’s aftermath.
Survivors realize the city is cut off from the rest of the country. All its communications systems have been disrupted. The telephone system is eighty percent destroyed. Hiroshima looks and sounds like a dead city. Only the skeletons of a few concrete buildings still stand, like long-abandoned places, along with some paved streets, roads and bridges and the surreal presence of the iron safes “Little Boy” couldn’t destroy. Some broken water pipes drip or spray over the ruins.
From the sky, it looks like a giant has stomped on Hiroshima and crushed it. Of the city’s 90,000 buildings, over 60,000 have been destroyed or damaged.
The emergency services, too, including the fire brigade, have been severely degraded. Eighty doctors have been killed, along with dozens of nurses. It’s a naked scene of loss.
“Kill me! Kill me!” someone shouts in a rage, her head caked in blood, clothes and skin hanging from her, the exposed flesh below the skin wet and mushy.
“I’m burning! I’m hot!”
“Help!”
“Water! Get me water!”
But some victims are too weak to call out. They can scarcely whisper “Help”.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE HIROSHIMA COMMUNICATIONS HOSPITAL, located about 1,500 meters from the hypocenter, is in bad shape. All its windows have been blown out. Many of its mattresses had been incinerated, and bed frames buckled. A fire has broken out. The hospital’s director has survived the blast but his body has been cut to ribbons.
A young man who has been taking photographs of the bomb’s aftermath puts his camera down when he comes across a scene too gruesome to put on film: a tram filled with charred corpses.
Hiroshima Station, about 2,000 meters from the epicenter, is badly damaged by blast effects. It’s still on fire. Along the platform and around the ticket barrier is strewn all manner of discarded footwear, clothes, and other items of daily life: shoes, clogs, sandals, jackets, bags, baskets, parasols, lunch boxes. The disorder left behind speaks of a scramble.
Outside the Telephone Bureau, a group of fifteen employees, stripped to the waist, were taking a gymnastics lesson at the time of the explosion and were incinerated. Those in the basement, shielded from the blast, however, are alive.
The bomb wiped out most of the Pioneer regiment of soldiers because their barracks was located near the center of the explosion.
An oil drum at a military depot blows up, and then another, and another, pumping more black smoke and fumes into the toxic air.
A woman pruning an apricot tree in the suburbs had her face burnt by the flash from the sky. Her eyebrows were scorched off her face.
Two sisters were bending over to weed a paddy field in the countryside when they were startled by a big bang beyond them. They felt what they thought was an earthquake. A wind blew lightly over the rice leaves. Then they turned around to witness what looked like a giant octopus rising up to attack the city.
A few kilometers away from them, a soldier had his nose and ears burned away and the only way to tell the front of his head from the back was through the row of teeth shining out of his badly torn mouth.
Many of the buildings of the Hiroshima Red Cross Hospital have burned down. Sixty-nine of its staff have paid the ultimate price of war, along with many patients.
In a schoolyard, a few pupils are crying. The only relief for their burns is some cooking oil to rub into their wounds. They whimper in relief. The swimming pool in the grounds is filled with bodies, some still squirming. Most of the scholars had fallen where they were standing in line for morning roll-call.
The Second Army Hospital is a burnt-out waste. A few emergency tents are being erected on the demolished site.
At the West Parade Ground, refugees start to cluster. It’s a seething mass of humanity. Some are caked in dried, blackish blood.
Then, a few hardy individuals decide to head off to the hills in search of a new start.
A streetcar bound for Yokogawa was stopped in its tracks by the explosion. For the passengers, everything turned black inside and outside. People panicked as they tried to escape the flames, some stepping on injured people like stepping stones. Those who did get out, walked straight into a sea of fire. There are more streetcars like this scattered around. In fact, over one hundred have been put out of service. Only fifteen of these vehicles are left operating.
Fires are cremating the dead, and burning the trapped. You can hear groans, shouts and calls of the injured victims. But no one hears the last, soft whispers of the dying.
The wilderness left behind by the pikadon is still aflame. At last, it’s starting to burn itself out. The cloud of death from the bomb hangs in the atmosphere like a giant ghost.
Parents search for missing children, children search for missing parents, sisters seek brothers, brothers seek sisters, husbands look for lost wives, wives look for lost husbands. Widows and widowers, orphans and the homeless wander through ruins. One problem is that many survivors are unrecognizable.
The bomb cloud billows and its dangling, squirming body emits fierce sparks of light of different colors. And all the time, it is churning, crackling, flickering, boiling, writhing, still alive with its evil intent.
Finally, the Dark Force peaks. It will soon start to die.
Survivors, including some soldiers, continue to gravitate towards the rivers. The hot smoke is so dense, they desire only to cool off in the waters. Some jump in even though they can’t swim. Otherwise, they fear they’ll choke to death. Dozens of bloated cadavers bob like logs on the water. People and animals float down the current. Those who are still alive hold onto flotsam. Some use dead bodies as lifebelts. Some corpses are clasped together in a huddle. The sacred waters of Hiroshima have turned red today.
The river banks, too, are covered in lifeless forms, twisted and scarred by their violent deaths. Police and prisoners are hooking bodies out and tying them up so they don’t fall back in. Some dead fish have floated belly-up to the surface.
Some impromptu clinics have been set up in libraries, churches, schools and under bridges. Injured refugees begin to stream up the irradiated valley away from the city, many with injuries, heads down, their minds numb, some with skin peeling off, their lives hanging in the balance.
The least injured carry the more seriously injured in a procession though the valley of death. The wasteland is smoldering and a deep sense of shame hangs heavily over a vanquished Hiroshima.
For hours, fires burn. The ground sizzles and the air crackles with radiation. The contorted postures of corpses not yet cleared away, or cremated, bear testimony to death’s suddenness. Weak sun-beams filter through the dust and ash.