Kokura

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

/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.
    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.

/Nigel Barley: The Devil's Garden. Love and war in Singapore under the 
Japanese flag/, /pp. 212-214/

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