In Mukden, Manchuria, where the Japanese Army had first defied its Government in 1931 by staging a coup, new armies walked the streets. Russian and Chinese Communist soldiers controlled the city. Merchants flew the flags of the USSR and Mao Tse-tung in their shopwindows. Chinese peasants looted the factories so laboriously built up by Japanese industrialists. Soviet trains pulled up to sidings and were loaded with heavy equipment and machine tools for shipment to Russia.
American OSS agents strolled casually about, snapping pictures of the virtual brick-by-brick dismemberment of the industry of Manchuria. They sent this evidence of Communist duplicity back to headquarters, which told them to stay where they were as long as possible, until the Russians threw them out. That would happen within days.
In the Home Islands of Japan, the enemy had come and taken control of the major cities. So far the occupation had been peaceful. Though scattered instances of rape, robbery and murder had occurred, both sides were amazed at the manner in which the two former foes had managed to adjust. Japan was under the control of a conquering army, but the ruling hand was quite restrained. In countless towns and hamlets, the first sight of the invader was frightening but the fear was short-lived. The Americans were businesslike and peaceful.
In the city of Nagasaki, three men walked down still-cluttered streets. The lonely trio were Chuck Sweeney, Kermit Beahan and Don Albury from the crew of Bock’s Car. Little more than a month before, they had come to Nagasaki, but at a height of twenty-nine thousand feet. From their plane had come the ugly, bulbous Fat Man which blew down buildings, roasted bodies and invaded bloodstreams. The three airmen had come back with the first American medical team into the stricken area. The night before they had stopped just outside town at a place called Mogi. After a pleasant meal, the fliers had talked awhile, then gone to bed. For the first time in his life, pilot Chuck Sweeney took out his pistol and belt and hung them on the bedpost. He felt uneasy—some Japanese might already have discovered the identity of the three men on the outskirts of Nagasaki.
The next morning they rode through the wreckage and walked the streets. It was only a little more than a month since the bomb had fallen, and some of the bodies had not yet been removed. Skulls lay on both sides of the road. In holes that had been scooped out as air-raid shelters, skeletons were piled on top of each other. The stench made it hard to breathe. It assailed the nostrils and caused an involuntary sucking in of breath.
In a cavity off the road, fire engines lay squashed down like bugs. At the medical center on the hill, the main building was still standing, but its interior had been burned out. From it doctors and nurses had run up to safety. In it patients who screamed for rescue from the approaching flames had been ignored.
The three strangers walked through the blackened rooms and saw bones lying in beds. They had been there for over a month, sightless skulls staring at the ceilings over which the great light had shone weeks before.
In one of the operating rooms, a patient lay on the operating table where he had been when the bomb burst. The skeleton waited as though hoping to be repaired. Around the room the remains of doctors and nurses sprawled in the positions they assumed at death. The room was a dreadful tableau, suspended in time by that awful brilliance which had touched everyone in Nagasaki.
They walked through the devastation, through the numbed and sullen survivors who acted differently from the people in Tokyo and other cities. These people were hurt beyond repair, warped forever by an unearthly power. They were indifferent to strangers, withdrawn from each other. Many were still dying from the insidious illness which had crept into their bloodstreams. They lived in lean-tos, thrown up to protect them from the cold nights and the burning sun, thrown up to bring some privacy to bodies stripped of pretensions to normalcy by the bomb. They ignored the men walking through the Urakami Valley in September of 1945.
The three Americans thought it was just as well.