<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div>We should refer to ourselves as "Homo Defectus".<br><br><br><div><a href="http://Www.innergroovemusic.com">Www.innergroovemusic.com</a></div></div><div><br>On Sep 7, 2015, at 9:32 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <<a href="mailto:lorentzen@hotmail.de">lorentzen@hotmail.de</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div>
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<i>Above the clouds over the city of Kokura two silver B-29 aircraft
circled peacefully. From 32,000 feet below they were silent and
all but invisible in the thick cloud. Small groups of planes were
usually for reconnaissance only and ignored by the ill-supplied
Japanese air force to save fuel. Kokura did not know how lucky a
city it was. Three days earlier, it had been designed an
alternative target for the first atomic bomb, 'Little Boy', should
Hiroshima be overcast. But it was August and Hiroshima's citizens
were blessed with a bright and sunny day. At the central tram
terminus, at the moment of detonation, a female employee was
wrestling with the difficult electrical contacts as she turned the
tram around. You were not supposed to do this on your own in case
the power cables got snagged. As the entire city was vaporized
about her, she emerged miraculously unscathed and assumed that it
was something she had done through her disregard of tram
regulations. When she learned that it was in fact a terrible
secret weapon unleashed by the enemy, she felt nothing but the
greatest possible relief. After all, she might have been disgraced
and dismissed.<br>
Now, three days later, the residents of Kokura were still not
feeling particularly lucky. Part of the cloud cover was the result
of a huge pall of smoke from a recent incendiary raid by American
bombers that had raged through the ancient wooden houses and torn
the heart out of their city. But it saved them from receiving 'Fat
Man', a bomb of much improved design, on their heads, for the
flight-commander, running short of fuel, diverted to nearby
Nagasaki where his bombardier applied the aiming skills he had
recently acquired over Singapore. It seemed, at first, that
Nagasaki too was cloudy, preventing visual targeting of the bomb
and various other packages of instruments, as well as a letter to
a noted Japanese physicist who was urged to convince the
authorities of the threat posed by the present weapon. This
ensured that he would be promptly arrested and held incommunicado
as a collaborator. A radar-guided attack was one alternative, or
they might just dish the weapon in the sea on the way back to
their base at the Marianas Islands where it would make a fine
splash. And then there came a sudden break in the cloud cover and
the bomb was released, twirling, into a shaft of redemptive Old
Testament sunlight. 43 seconds later, at a height of some 1500
feet, it exploded some two miles off target, above the Urakami
Valley, destroying the cathedral and many of the Christians who
lived around it, traditionally the people who acted as mediators
between Japan and the dangerous outside. One man had survived the
Hiroshima bomb and been evacuated to the hospital in Nagasaki,
arriving just in time to meet the second atomic bomb. Owing to the
unusual topography of the city, he survived that too, making him
either the luckiest or unluckiest man on the face of the planet,
while a small residential valley, running north east, was shielded
by high hills except where the blast waves, five in number,
ricocheted off the slopes in walls of volcanic heat that melted
rock back to lava. Worst hit was a little settlement with a river
running through it and a large meadow in which little girls had
practised to receive their invaders with bamboo spears.<br>
<br>
</i>Nigel Barley: The Devil's Garden. Love and war in Singapore
under the Japanese flag<i>, </i>pp. 212-214<i><br>
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