Atomic bombing of Nagasaki

T V Perera

This is an eye-witness account of the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki by Sidney Lawrence, a Leading Air Craftsman attached to 36 Torpedo Bomber Squadron of the RAF, who was captured and taken Prisoner-of-War by the Japanese in Java in March in 1942. He eked out the POW camps, finally arriving at a camp in Nagasaki, where he was in August 1945.

“I was in a camp called Seisumashi near the Mitsubishi Works, along with a few other mixed POWs - Japanese, Aussies, a few Americans and some British. At that camp we did all sorts of jobs - coal mining, stevedoring, road making - we were slave labour.

The Japanese said very definitely that if they were invaded, under no circumstance would they do other than kill every prisoner. In Nagasaki itself they were going to put us into caves, which we were forced to dig out ourselves, and they were just going to blow them in. No prisoner was to be left alive, once they were invaded. They made that quite plain. Now and then the Americans came over and just bombed us and there was a lot of devastation caused. Of course, we were the ones who had to clear it up. We used to hope that they wouldn’t come as we were very tired and exhausted of clearing rubble.

On August 9, I was working in the open. At about 11 o’ clock in the morning I saw a plane fly over and recognized it as a B-29 Superfortress belonging to the US Airforce. As I watched, I saw a bomb being dropped from the plane, and I actually saw it coming down. It came down fast on a parachute. As soon as the bomb touched the ground there was a deafening explosion and a blinding flash. I got flung onto the ground. It was quite a while before I came to my senses after the blast. Even then I was in a daze.

As I got up slowly, I looked around and saw that things were on fire. Everything was simply going up in flames. There were about 35,000 people lying dead around me. They had died instantly the bomb exploded. Most were burnt to a cinder. There were many more dying. I was fortunate enough to get away with not being rubbed out with the bomb, or being badly burned. I was a miraculous survivor. One particular guard who was with me also escaped being killed. He was in such a state that he first put his rifle down and ran for it.

Thick blast smoke

A thick black smoke was rising from where I saw the bomb fall. The buildings were actually flattened and destroyed altogether. There was one building with its steel girders all twisted but it looked as if it was still intact. If you hit a girder with a stick, the stick went right through it. It was like brick dust. The girder just looked twisted. It was frightening.

The hills beyond looked as if someone had taken a whitewash brush and run a line straight down the side. One side was burnt and scorched white - on the other the grass was growing un-touched. The trees were just the same. One side of the trees was burnt to cinders and the other said has its leaves on. The horrifying things to see was that people were just shadows. You didn’t find the body, but you found their shadow emblazoned in the concrete. The persons weren’t there - they had gone up in smoke. The limbs of very many who were alive were torn. The skins had peeled off and the flesh was hanging out. It was like raw meat hanging from a butcher’s shop. The hair on the heads of some people suffered the same fate. It just dropped off at the touch. The movement of the Japanese around, who could move - well, they were just scurrying about like mice. Everybody was in a particular kind of daze.

The effects on me afterwards were disastrous. I felt a burning sensation on my body and came out in all sorts of strange boils with green pus. I had various different skin complaints. My hands started splitting between my fingers. All my extremities were affected and it used to look as if my fingers were dropping off. My feet were the same every now and then my skin split between my toes and it looked as if my toes would drop off.

This condition lasted for several years. We didn’t know what was happening until we later learnt that we all were suffering from radiation sickness. Afterwards we heard American radio talking of ‘the TONIC bomb’, because ‘ATOMIC’ meant nothing to us. What on earth was a tonic bomb? Later on we heard that American had dropped the second Atom bomb nicknamed ‘Fat Man’ on Nagasaki.

Fat Man

The bomb at Nagasaki is the filthiest bomb which has ever been dropped. The one at Hiroshima was a Neutron bomb, but this Plutonium bomb was filthy. The two are set off in a completely different way. Plutonium effects on human being are disgusting. Right from the beginning all doctors said that they didn’t know what to do. They knew nothing about how to treat the effects of nuclear bombs.

From the moment that all this happened, I felt at one with the Japanese and all the misery and starvation, all the three and a half years of what I had been through, vanished. I felt they were the same as me and I was the same as them. I ended up helping the Japanese and trying to do everything we could, those of us who were still alive and able to. They couldn’t understand that we were trying to treat them. They couldn’t understand why the few of us who were left didn’t turn on the Japanese and kill them. We were British. We couldn’t. We helped them and they were grateful for what we were doing. I used to help with the surgeons and doctors, and I would ask if they had anything I could use to help the wounded.

We had gauze and a dark brown sort of ointment with a ghastly smell, just to smooth. While trying to put this stuff on their wounds several died cradled in my arms. Some of them were the very Japanese who, a few days before had been treating us most cruelly. Some of the fellows from the camp left and tried to get to Tokyo but I knew it was too far. I didn’t see how in the condition they were in, they could have ever reached Tokyo.

We heaped up the bodies and set fire to them. We had to do that or there would have been plague. It was a horrifying sight to see the horrible burns and the way the flesh hung off the people.

After the bomb we were free to come and go - they didn’t look on us as prisoners. The Americans came over and dropped food to us on parachutes and it was food galore, like we hadn’t seen in years.

It was K rations and we shared them with the Japanese.

When the Americans came to fetch us out, I was in a pretty bad state. When they landed, one of them came over and looked me up and down. He went for his revolver in its holster and said, “Who do you want me to shoot?”. He was a big, tall fellow with a shaven head, real American style. I said “You put that gun away, or I’ll shoot you myself. All I want you to do, is to leave them alone and get us out of here.”

The mushroom cloud was there for quite a time. We were very fortunate in as much as two days later, we had a typhoon and there were terrific winds and torrential rains. I think that was a god-send because this terrific wind was blowing the dust away to sea, and the rain was washing down the ground. It was awful at the time, but I really do think it saved us.”

The attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended all resistance in Japan and with that the World War II was finally over.