Fwd: Kokura, August 6, 1945 and Gravity's Rainbow

[Mark Kohut]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
Date: Tue, Aug 6, 2019 at 10:05 AM
Subject: Re: Kokura
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>



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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