Cruiser (74 page)

McGovern lay in agony in a ward alongside two other men, who'd each had a leg amputated. An American medic named Buck Barlow looked after him, although he was unable to give him so much as an aspirin for his pain. Over the next few days, the amputees disappeared. Barlow believed that Japanese doctors had murdered them by opening an artery in the groin to drain blood for transfusions. Fearing he would be next, McGovern pleaded with the American to help him out of bed. With the pain surging over him in waves, he tottered out onto the hospital's verandah. Then, despite the paralysis, he felt the urge to empty his bowels. For a while, he clung to the verandah posts, too frightened to move, but with a supreme effort he staggered out to the toilet – a hole in the ground surrounded by a few pieces of rusty galvanised iron. Dizzy, he was terrified that he might collapse into the muck. But he realised he could walk. A few days later, a Japanese officer ordered the prisoner patients out to a courtyard, drew a line in the dirt with the scabbard of his sword and ordered them to stand on it. A squad of soldiers with rifles came to attention:

Frank McGovern's luck had held again. Three
Perth
men, Able Seamen Pat Major and Keith Mills, and Petty Officer Tommy
Johnson, were killed in that firebombing, a month before the end of the war. Mills and McGovern had been close mates on the railway.

The guards at Omuta, Bill Bee's camp, hated and feared the B-29s, or the
Bee-nee-ju-ku
, as they called them. The prisoners could only hope that the American planners knew where they were and would not bomb them. There were air-raid shelters dug into the earth in the camp, but they would have been useless in a direct hit.

On 26 July, another bombing mission was under way to Omuta. That evening, 132 B-29s of the USAAF'S 314th Bombardment Wing took off from Guam on the seven-hour flight there and back. They carried a total of 965 tons of bombs – 500-pound M17 incendiary clusters that would explode at 5000 feet and rain burning fuel, and 100-pound M47 incendiary bombs designed to burn on impact with the ground, sucking oxygen into a firestorm. The first of them arrived over the target just after midnight, early on the morning of 27 July, and the attack continued for hours.
¹²

About one-third of Omuta and its civilian population was obliterated, and the bombs that fell on Baron Takaharu Mitsui's zinc smelter also killed 15 British prisoners. The baron, a mild-mannered stamp collector, was said to have been most upset, although whether at the destruction of his smelter or the death of the prisoners was never clear. After the war, he gave a grotesque little tea party for Allied officers imprisoned in Omuta. If not executed as a war criminal, he at least should have been imprisoned for a stretch. Perhaps a generous donation of rare postage stamps saved him. In a bizarre twist, Mitsui was elected to the Hall of Fame of the American Philatelic Society in 1984.

As Japan burned, in Europe the Allies were fulfilling Churchill's vow to extinguish every spark of Nazism. In early February, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met at the Black Sea resort of Yalta to insist again on the unconditional surrender of Germany and to redraw the map of post-war Europe. In late
March, the Allies crossed the Rhine. April was a month of triumph and tragedy on a Shakespearean scale. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a sudden cerebral haemorrhage at his Little White House at Warm Springs, Georgia, on 12 April, the United States and the free world mourned the fall of this great American oak. The Axis partners reacted with something like hysteria. Goebbels, telephoning the thrilling news to Hitler, babbled that Roosevelt's death was the turning point that would swing the war back in Germany's favour. It was ‘Heaven's punishment', said Japan's
Mainichi Shimbun
newspaper; Tokyo Rose was in transports of delight in her radio broadcast that evening.

John Curtin cabled Roosevelt's wife, Eleanor, ‘I hope that you and your family can draw some comfort from the fact that your husband died in the cause of all humanity and in a duty from which he never swerved.' The words could have served as Curtin's own obituary. At the end of the month, he was taken to hospital in Canberra with severe congestion of the lungs. He stayed there for three weeks, his condition seeming to improve, and he returned to The Lodge in late May, but his health sank again and by July, in the chill of the Canberra winter, he was too weak to walk. On the night of 4 July, he told Elsie, ‘I'm ready now,' and he died before dawn the next morning. After lying in state at King's Hall in Parliament House, his body was taken by gun carriage to Canberra Airport for the flight to Perth. He was buried in the Karrakatta Cemetery.

April would claim two more of the war's totemic figures. Captured and then shot by Italian communist partisans, Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were strung up by the heels and stoned in a marketplace in Milan on 29 April. That same day, with Berlin in ruins and the Red Army only streets away from the bunker in the Wilhelmstrasse, Adolf Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun, and signed his last will and testament, ranting to the end that the German people were unworthy of his greatness. On Monday 30 April, they committed their
Gotterdammerung
suicide, and the SS burned their bodies in
the bunker garden. Berlin fell to the Russians on 2 May, and on 7 May Germany itself surrendered. To wild rejoicing, Victory in Europe (VE) Day was proclaimed on 8 May.

For half the world, though, the war was not over. The new American President, Harry S. Truman, had on his desk in the Oval Office a hand-painted wooden sign announcing that ‘the buck stops here'. He had been an artillery captain in the First World War, famously fond of another homely saying: ‘If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.' He would be put to the test on both counts.

In March, the US Marines had taken the tiny island of Iwo Jima, with the immortal raising of the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi – the first piece of Japanese territory to fall to the Americans. From late March till June, the battle for Okinawa – roughly halfway between the Philippines and Japan – raged in a hellish engagement by land, sea and air, with kamikaze pilots hurling themselves into the invasion fleets and at least 100,000 Japanese troops dying or committing suicide. Among the 16 Japanese warships sunk was the world's largest battleship, the giant 70,000-ton
Yamato
, hit by waves of American aircraft on 7 April and blowing up in a pillar of fire and smoke seen 150 kilometres away, with the loss of 2500 of her crew. The Allies sustained more than 50,000 casualties, with 12,000 men killed in action – a toll that carried an awful message for the military planners in Washington. Casualties would inevitably be far worse in an invasion of the Japanese home islands. One estimate by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Truman predicted that more than a quarter of a million Americans would be killed in a battle in Japan itself, or as many again as had died in all the theatres of war so far. The fighting could well go on into 1946.

Historians broadly accept that it was Okinawa that finally convinced the President to employ the atom bomb. It had been successfully tested in the New Mexico desert on 16 July, and the scientists were convinced it could be delivered by aircraft to Japanese cities. At Potsdam, outside Berlin, Truman informed
Churchill of the test. The two were meeting with Stalin to carve up post-war Germany. On 26 July, the President, with Churchill and China's Chiang Kai-shek, issued the Potsdam Declaration – a radio broadcast warning Japan to make an immediate and unconditional surrender or face ‘prompt and utter destruction of the Japanese homeland'. That same day, Truman ordered the Commander of the US Strategic Air Forces, General Carl Spaatz, to prepare to drop the ‘special bombs' on the cities of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kokura or Niigata at a time to be decided after the first week in August.

Potsdam was Churchill's last act as Britain's wartime Prime Minister. For all his faults, he had been correct in his magnificent conviction that the greatness of the Anglo-Saxon people would triumph over Nazism, and he had prosecuted the war as no other Briton could have. But the British people did not want him as their leader in the post-war world. In the so-called khaki election that July, they voted the Conservatives out of office, giving the Labour Party a resounding majority of 145 seats in the House of Commons. On the same day as the Potsdam Declaration was published, the Labour leader, Clement Attlee, became the new occupant of No. 10 Downing Street.

Japan, too, had a new prime minister: Baron Kantaro Suzuki – a former admiral who had long been an opponent of war with the United States. Fumbling and ineffectual, Suzuki knew the unconditional surrender demanded at Potsdam was inevitable, but, in the volcanic heat of Japanese politics, he had no way of making it happen. The army would simply have assassinated him and fought on – as, indeed, it eventually tried to do. The Japanese had no idea that an atomic bomb had moved off the drawing board into the American arsenal. For the moment, Tokyo's only reply to the Allied ultimatum was what the
Asahi Shimbun
newspaper described as
mokusatsu
, or silent contempt.

The prisoners of war in Japan,
Perth
's survivors among them, knew little or nothing of this sweep of tumultuous events.
It was obvious from the bombing and the devastation they saw around them that the war was closing in as it reached its end, but what would that end be? Occasionally, a rumour would sweep one camp or another: the buzz was that the Americans were preparing to land, or that the Japanese were about to surrender. But the prisoners' hopes of an Allied invasion were tempered by the certain knowledge that it would be a fanatical, protracted fight to the death, with every chance that they might be massacred before rescue could arrive. No more than their captors did they imagine the final apocalyptic act that would bring their long ordeal to a close.

Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, 30 years old in 1945, Commander of the 509th Composite Bombardment Group, was thought by many to be the finest bomber captain in the United States Army Air Force. A shy and taciturn man, born in a small town in Illinois, he had an exemplary record of missions over Germany, with a stint as a test pilot on the cantankerous B-29 Superfortress before it went into service. He was the natural choice to fly the specially equipped B-29 that would drop the first atom bomb. He named the aircraft
Enola Gay
, after his mother.

The target had been chosen: Hiroshima, a city of about a quarter of a million people on the largest Japanese island, Honshu. In late July, the bomb itself, code-named ‘Little Boy', was ready and waiting at Tinian in the Marianas – a speck in the Pacific Ocean east of the Philippines. By the standards of the era, it was an enormous weapon: three metres long, weighing 4000 kilograms and packed with 64 kilograms of Uranium-235.

At 2.45 on the morning of Monday 6 August,
Enola Gay
rumbled down the long crushed-coral runway on Tinian, Tibbets at the controls, the aircraft struggling to gain height and speed as she lifted her great burden into the air. Two other
B-29s accompanied her –
The Great Artiste
and
Necessary Evil
– to take photographs and record scientific data, and shortly after 8 am Japan time they were over Hiroshima at a height of 32,000 feet, the city visible beneath lightly scattered cloud. On the ground, the air-raid sirens had sounded, but, with only a handful of aircraft observed, the Japanese air defence did not believe that a major raid was under way and no fighter aircraft were scrambled.

Tibbets ordered his crew to put on the protective welder's goggles they had been given, and, at 8.15,
Enola Gay
's bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee, with the aiming point of the T-shaped Aioi Bridge directly in his Norden sights, opened the bomb-bay doors. Little Boy ejected automatically. Relieved of her load, the aircraft bucked upwards, and Tibbets took her away in a fast, wide curve to avoid the blast. ‘You have just dropped the first atom bomb in history,' he told his 12-man crew.

Exactly as planned, the bomb fell for precisely 43 seconds, to a height of 600 metres. Then it detonated with the force of 13,000 tons of TNT, a livid purple fireball generating a temperature, for a nanosecond, of 300,000 degrees centigrade, with winds of up to 700 kilometres an hour. At ground zero, directly beneath the explosion, Hiroshima was demolished in an instant over a radius of some 1.6 kilometres. Fires raged for another four square kilometres. Some 75,000 people were killed that moment – some of them literally vaporised, others reduced to shapeless lumps of charcoal or a ghostly shadow left on a blank slab of concrete pavement – and in coming years that toll would double as others succumbed to radiation sickness. For hours, a great mushroom cloud rose above the city, causing such turbulence in the upper atmosphere that rain began to fall, stained black by radioactive dust.
Enola Gay
was back on Tinian that afternoon, where a beaming General Spaatz pinned a Distinguished Service Cross on Tibbets's flying suit. The fillings in the pilot's teeth were still tingling from the radioactivity.