Kokura

[rich]

Hiroshima

the welcoming downpours were black and wet
the stream of neighbors, lovers, children, untold thousands
newly born in the firestorm
returning once more
to nourish neighbors, lovers, children…

all those upturned grateful open-wide faces

On Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 10:05 AM Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
wrote:

>
> https://ww2db.com/image.php?image_id=9667
>
> "In one of these streets, in the morning fog, plastered over two slippery
> cobblestones, is a scrap of newspaper headline, with a wirephoto of a giant
> white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic
> bush. The letters
>
>                                                          MB DRO
>                                                           ROSHI
>
> appear above with the logo of some occupation newspaper, a grinning
> glamour girl riding astraddle the cannon of a tank, steel penis with
> slotted serpent head, 3rd Armored treads 'n' triangle on a sweater rippling
> across her tits. The white image has the same coherence, the hey-lookit-me
> smugness, as the Cross does. It is not only a sudden white genital onset in
> the sky---it is also, perhaps, a Tree.... "
>
> Gravity's Rainbow, pp. 693-694
>
> Am 07.09.15 um 15:32 schrieb 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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>