* Help, if you please!” Wl iy is THE POST, FRIDAY, JUN Through the courtesy of the New Yorker Magazine which some months ago devoted its entire issue to a report on the atomic bomb explosion over Hiroshima, Japan, The Post is permitted to publish here John Hershey's graphic account on the almost complete oblitera- tion of a great city. The charac- ters in this story are of another race but such a catastrophe ‘might happen to any American city. If you have never read this “article in its entirety we ask you to take the few extra mim- utes required each week to do : so- The incredible destructive power of the atomic bomb makes it necessary for all of us to take the time to consider the terrible implicationsof its use. Editor (Continued from last week) The street was cluttered with parts of houses that had slid into it, and with fallen telephone poles and wires. From ‘every second or third house came the voices of people buried and abandoned, who invariably screamed, with formal politeness, ““Tasukete kure! The priests recognized several ruins from which these cries came ‘as the homes of friends, but because of the fire it was too late to help. All the way, Mr. Fukai whimpered, “Let me stay.” The party turned right when they came to a block of fallen houses that was one flame. At Sakai Bridge, which would take them across to the East Parade Ground, they saw that the whole community on the opposite side of the river was a sheet of fire; they dared not cross and decided to take refuge in Asano Park, off to their left. Father Kleinsorge, who had been weakened for a couple of days by his bad case of diarrhea, began to stagger under his protesting burden, and as he tried to climb up over the wreckage of several houses that blocked their way to the park, he stumbled, dropped Mr. Fukai, and plunged HIROSHIMA 2 02"The Fire down, head over heels, to the edge of the river. When he picked himself After crossing Koi Bridge and Kan- non Bridge, having run the whole up; he saw Mr. Fukai running away. | way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he ap- Father Kleinsorge shouted ‘to a dozen soldiers, who were standing by the bridge, to stop him. As Father Klein- sorge started back to get Mr. Fukai, Father LaSalle called out, “Hurry! Don’t waste time!” So Father Klein- sorge just requested the soldiers to take care of Mr. Fukai. They said they would, but the little, broken man got away from them, and the last the priests could see of him, he ‘| was running back toward the fire. Father Kleinsorge began to shove and haul Mr. Fukai out of the room. Then the theological student came up and grabbed Mr. Fukai's feet, and Father Kleinsorge took his shoulders, and together they carried him down-. stairs and outdoors. “I can’t walk!” Mr. Fukai cried. “Leave me here!” Father Kleinsorge got this paper suit- case with the money in it and took Mr. Fukai up pickaback, and the party started for the East Parade Ground, their district's “safe area.” As they went out of the gate, Mr. Fukai, quite childlike now, beat on Father Klein- sorge’s shoulders and said, “1 won't leave. I won't leave.” Irrelevantly, Father Kleinsorge turned to Father LaSalle and said, “We have lost all our possessions but not our sense of humor.” i Mr. Tanimoto, fearful for his fam- ily and church, at first ran toward them by the shortest route, along Koi Highway. He was the only person making his way into the city; he met | hundreds and hundreds who were flee ing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, ‘on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes ab- sorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had on their kimonas. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent an dshowed no expression whatever. ——— NO WAITING= ORDER NOW! supplier in Iris Shutter > MT N==o=< YORK-HEAT BOILER-BURNER UNITS for immediate installation Automatic oil-fired units combining boiler, burner, and residential hot water unit . . . with the patented : Housekeeping Guaranty Seal. Call us for details. S$. M. ASH & SONS 77 East Dorrance St. Phone 7-6613 KINGSTON one handsome and Good WT OR 4 REFy, one x TI < Guaranteed by 4 Good Housekeeping Zh & + \ 2245 Aovinmseo HES | surprise him. NOTHING BETTER J the center, * that all the houses had been crushed and many were ‘afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to - penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stop- ped him. Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neigh- bors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them. As a Christian he was. filled with com- passion for those who were trapped, and as a Japanese he was overwhelmed by’ the shame of being unhurt, and he prayed as he ran, “God help them and take them out of the fire.” He thought he would skirt the fire, to the left. He ran back to Kannon Bridge and followed for a distance one of the rivers. He tried several cross streets, but all were blocked, so he turned far left and ran out to Yokogawa, a station on a railroad line that detoured the city in a wide semicircle, and he followed the rails until he came to a buraing train. So impressed was he by this time by the extent of the damage that he ran north two miles to Gion, a suburb in the foothills. All the way, he over took dreadfully burned and lacerated people, and in his guilt he turned to right and left as he hurried and said to some of them, “Excuse me for having no burden like yours.” Near Gion, he began to meet country people going toward the city to help, and when they saw him, several ex- claimed, ‘Look! There is one who is not wounded.” At Gion, he bore toward the right bank of the main river, the Ota, and ran down it until he reached fire again. There was no fire on the other side of the river, so he threw off his shirt and shoes and plunged into it. In midstream, where the current was fairly strong, exhaustion and fear finally caught up with him—he had run nearly seven miles—and he became limp and drifted in the water. He prayed, ‘Please God, help me to cross. It would be nonsense for me to be drowned when I am the only uninjured one.” He managed a few more strokes and fetched up on a spit downstream. proached Mr. Tanimoto climbed up the bank and ran along it. until, near a large Shinto shrine, he came to more fire, and as he turned left to get around it, he met, by incredible luck, his wife. She was carrying their infant son. Mr. Tanimoto was now so emo- tionally worn out that nothing could He did not embrace his wife; he simply said, “Oh, you are safe.” She told him that she had got home from her night in Ushida just in time for the ‘explosion; she had been buried under the parsonage with the baby in her arms. She told how the wreckage had pressed down on her, how the baby had cried. She saw a chink of light, and by reaching up with a hand, she worked the hole bigger, bit by bit. After about. half an hour, she heard the crackling noise of wood burning. At last the open- ing was big enough” for her to push the baby out, and afterward she crawled out herself. She said she was now going out to Ushida again. COUGHS CHEST COLDS ACHES—PAINS Try Quay’s G. G. S. Goose Grease Salve Penetrating Rub AT ALL GOOD STORES 50¢ Mr. Tanimoto said he wanted to see his church and take care of the people of his Neighborhood Association. They parted as casually—as bewildered——as they had met. Ys $ AL Mr. Tahimoto’s way around the fire took him across the East Parade Ground, which, being an evacuation area, was now the scene of a grue: some review; rank.on rank of the burned and bleeding. Those who were burned moaned, ‘Mizu, mizu! Water, water!” Mr. Tanimoto found a basin in a nearby street and located a water tap that still worked in the crushed shell of a house, and he be- ‘gan carrying water to the suffering strangers. When he had given drink to about thirty of them, he realized he was taking too much time. “‘Ex- cuse me,” he said loudly to those nearby who were reaching out their hands to him and crying their thirst. “I have many people to take care of.” Then he ran away. He went to the river again, the basin in his hand, and jumped down onto a sandspit. There he saw hundreds of people so badly wounded that they could not get up to go farther' from the burn- ing city. Whenever they saw a man erect and unhurt, the chant began again: “Mizu, mizu, mizu.” Mr. Tan- imoto could not resist them; he carried them water from the river—a mistake, since it was tidal and brackish. Two or three small boats were ferrying hurt people across the river from Asano Park, and when one touched the spit, Mr. Tanimoto again made his loud, apologetic speech and jumped into the boat. It took him across to the park. There, in the under- brush, he found some of his charges of the Neighborhood Association, who had come there by his previous instruc- tions, and saw many acquaintances, among them Father Kleinsorge and the other Catholics. But he missed Fukai, who had been a close friend. “Where is Fukai-san?” he asked. “He didn’t want to come with us,” Father Kleinsorge said. ‘He ran back.” When Miss Sasaki heard the voices of the people caught along with her she began speaking to them. Her nearest neighbor, she discovered, was a high-school girl who had been draf- ted for factory work, and who said her back was broken. Miss Sasaki replied, “I am lying here and I can’t move. My left leg is cut off.” Some time later, she again heard somebody walk overhead and then move off to one side, and whoever it was began burrowing. The digger released several people, and when he had uncovered the high-school girl, she found that her back was not broken, after all, and she crawled out. Miss Sasaki spoke to the rescuer, and he worked toward her. He pulled away a great number of books, until he had made a tunnel to her. She could see his perspiring face as he said, “Come out, Miss.” She tried. “I can’t move,” she said. The man excavated some more and told her to try with all her strength to get out. But books were heavy on her hips, ‘and the man finally saw that a bookcase was leaning on the books and that a heavy beam pressed down on the bookcase. “Wait,” he said. “T'll get a crowbar.” The man was gone a long time, and when he came back, he was ill-tem- pered, as if her plight were all her fault. | “We have no, men to help you!” he shouted in through the tun- nel. “You'll have to get out by your- self.” “That's impossible,” she said. “My left leg . . .” The man went away. Much later, several men came and dragged Miss Sasaki out. Her left leg was not severed, but .it was badly broken and cut and it hung askew below the knee. They took her out into a courtyard. It was raining. She sat on the ground in the rain. When the downpour increased, some- one directed all the wounded people to take cover in the factory's air-raid shelters. “Come ' along,” a torn-up E 20, 1947. in the dilapidation at the tin factory, woman said to her. “You can hop.” But Miss Sasaki could not move, and she just waited in the rain. Then a man’ propped up a large sheet of corrugated iron as a kind of lean-to, and took her in-his arms and carried her to’ it. - She was grateful until he brought two horribly wounded people’ '—a woman with a whole breast sheared off and a man whose face was all raw from a burn—to share the simple shed with her. No one came back. The rain cleared and the cloudy after- noon was hot; before nightfall the three grotesques under the slanting piece of . twisted iron began to smell quite bad. . The former head of the Noboricho ‘Neighborhood Association, to which the Catholic priests belonged, was an energetic man named Yoshida., He had ‘boasted, when he was in charge of the district air-raid defenses, that fire might eat away all of Hiroshima but it would never, come to Nobori cho. The bomb blew down his house, and a joist pinned him by the legs, in. full view of the Jesuit. mission house across the way and of the people hurrying along the street. In their confusion as they hurried past, Mrs. Nakamura, with ‘her children, and Father Kleinsorge, with Mr. Fukai on his back, hardly saw him; he was just part of the general blur of misery through which they moved. His cries for help brought no response from them; there were so many people shout- ing for help that they could not hear him separately. They and all the others went along. Noboricho became absolutely deserted, and the fire swept through it. = Mr. Yoshida saw the wooden mission house—the only ‘erect building in the area—go up in a lick of flame, and the heat was terrific on his face. Then flames came along his side of the street and entered his house. In a paroxysm of terrified strength, he freed himself and ran down the alleys of Nobori-cho, hemmed in by the fire he had said would never come. He began at once to behave like an old man; two months later his hair was white. As Dr. Fujii stood in the river up to his neck to avoid the heat of the fire, the wind grew stronger and stronger, and soon, even though the expanse of water was small, the waves grew so high that the people under the bridge could no longer keep their footing. Dr. Fujii went close to the shore, crouched down, and embraced a large stone with his usable arm. Later it became possible to wade along the very edge of the river, and Dr. Fujii and his two surviving nurses moved about two’ hundred yards up- stream, to a sandspit near Asano Park. Many wounded were lying on the sand. Dr. Machii was there with his family; his daughter, who had been outdoors when the bomb burst, was badly burned on her hands and legs but fortunately not on her face. Although Dr. Fujii's shoulder was by now ter- ribly painful, he examined the girl's burns curiously. Then he lay down. In spite of the misery all around, he was ashamed of his appearance, and he remarked to Dr. Machii that he looked like a beggar, dressed as he was in nothing but torn and bloody underwear. Late in the afternoon, when the fire began to subside, he decided to go to his parental house, in the suburb of Nagatsuka. He asked ‘Dr. Machii to join him, but the Doc- tor answered that he and his family were going to spend the night oa the spit, because of his daughter's injuries. Dr. Fujii, together with his nurses, walked first to Ushida, where, in the partially damaged houses of some relatives, he found first-aid ma- terials he had stored there. The two nurses bandaged him and he them. They went on. Now not many people walked in the streets, but a great number sat and lay on the pavement, vomited, waited for death, and died. The number of corpses on the way to Nagatsuka was more and more puzzling. The Doctor wondered: Could a Molotov flower basket have done all this? Dr. Fujii reached his family's house in the evening. It was five miles from the center of town, but its roof had fallen in and the windows were all broken. for a Get -Together \ \ \ \ \ \ \ WN A \ \ \ NN The new house being built by George Wesley is progressing nicely, also the new plot of houses being built by Sheldon Pollock on the old Acadamy property are coming along very well. Rev. and Mrs. Ira Button attended the installation service of their son Lewis, who has been called as pastor of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church, Budd Lake, N. J. They also visited their daughter and son-in-daw, Mr. and Mrs. Truman Stewart of East Stroudsburg. Their ‘grandson, Philip, returned home with them to spend his summer vacation. Mr. and Mrs. Edward Kocher and daughter Kathryn of Lehman and Carl Brandon of Fairdale were callers at the home of Rev. and Mrs. Ira’ Button. The Sweet Valley Fire Company are meeting each week in the Church of Christ Hall and are having a class of instructions which is very helpful. Mrs. Willard Sutliff has returned from General Hospital where she was under observation for several days. Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Cragle and daughter, Doris, spent the weekend with their ‘son and daughter-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Rolland Cragle of Middlesex, N.J. Janice Bronson and Bonnie and Dixie Piper submitted to tonsil oper- ations at Nanticoke Hospital last week. Miss Bess Klinetob spent Sunday with her brother and family, Rev. and Mrs. Hugh Klinetob of Moscow. This” week she was guest of Mr. and Mrs. William Schmoll at East Dallas for several days. * A father and son banquet was held at Church of Christ Monday eve- ning. Mrs. Alfred Bronson was among those who left Wednesday to attend a D. of A. Conference in Philadelphia. There were two bus loads. NOTICE ! Any one having a plate from the PTA bake sale or the library auction bake sale is asked to return it to Bert's Drug Store or phone Mrs .John Shee- han and it will be called for. ELECTRONIC Protection For your watch Repairs This Electronic instrument tells us what is wrong when you bring your watch in, and it tells you it is right when you take it away. Faster, more economical repairs, with print- ed proof of accuracy. Henry's Watch SWEET VALLEY Repair Shop MAIN STREET, DALLAS Next to Bank in Hagletine’s Garage Mr. and Mrs. Clyde Lee and son Billie of Chester spent Sunday with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Casterline. Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood Mckenna and children Richard and Joan of Washington, D.C. spent the weekend with her parents, Mr, and Mrs, George Casterline. Heh Mrs. Edward Dungey of Forty Fort spent the weekend with her sister and brother-inlaw, Mr. and Mrs. James Casterline. i Donald Boice and children Donna and Harry of Dallas spent Sunday with Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Boice. Mrs. Mabel Mann of Kingston spent Sunday with Mr. and Mrs. Al Rinken. Alderson Ladies Make Plans For Summer Tea W.S.C.S. of Church is making plans to hold a tea at the home of Mrs. C. B. Knarr at Alderson. Wednesday, July 9 from two until five o'clock. Mrs. Gilbert Carpenter is general chairman and assistants are Mrs. Raymond Garinger, Mrs. Frank Jackson, * Mrs. . Hobart Ferry, Mrs. Albert Armitage, Mrs. Joseph Rauch and Mrs. Warren Dennis. Fine Memorials LARGE SELECTION Summit Hill Marble & Granite Co. Luzerne-Dallas Highway 15% OFF ON ALL SMALL APPLIANCES HOUSE CLEANING SPECIALS ENAMELS 98c qt., $3.25 gal. White and all colors. WALLPAPER Close-out room lots. $5.00 values now $1.98 to $2.50. Odd Rolls, 10c, 15¢, 25c. In stock now. The largest 1947 weaves and floral wall- paper styled by Berge Com- pany and United Wallpaper Mills. Now in stock. 100% HOUSE PAINT $4.95. Reg. $5.95 value. Also in stock LINOLEUM Window Shades Lamp Shades FULL LINE OF Greeting Cards LUZERNE WALLPAPER & Paint Store 121 Main Street, Luzerne Across from the Bank T ARVESTER REELE sn” 1 Here and ready for | your inspection. Big, y roomy, 11-cubic-foot capacity. Freezes and \ stores 385 pounds of / delicious food. DON'T | WAIT... supply is not | unlimited. The big friendly International Store GEORGE BULF International Harvester Sales and Service: HILLSIDE, PENNSYLVANIA, ~~ . TELEPHONES §& he s Alderson Methodist RE
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