Record by an Army Doctor
3. New Tragedy
I think it was about four or five days after the bombing that unexpected changes began to appear as symptoms in the survivors in Hesaka. Something unusual might have happened before that time. We must have failed to observe such changing conditions, because so many victims were dying with heavy burns and fatal wounds every day.
About five days after the bombing, most of the patients who had been expected to die were all dead. Signs of recovery began to appear little by little on those patients who were burned or injured relatively slightly. Though they had an appalling appearance with the burns and wounds, the depth of the burns were comparatively shallow. We began to expect them to recover more speedily than their appearance indicated.
During this period, a field hospital had been set up. It consisted of mesh screening supported by poles. The ground was covered with straw mats. The medical groups were composed of people from military hospitals from every district. They took charge of all patients, including those in the farmer's houses which had been used as wards, and they began to efficiently care for them. The Director had already come back from Osaka, and the hospital was beginning to recover its function. The number of deaths was increasing every day, and the wounded continued to come into Hesaka village. So the Director had to give the order to transfer some of the slightly wounded people to other Branch Hospitals. But, at that time, nobody knew when the Geibi Line train would reopen. We had no other transport, so it was very doubtful how many patients could leave Hesaka. The number of medical technicians was not enough for the mass of patients; therefore, we asked the slightly wounded people to help us, like Women's Club members. The doctor's wife, who had her breast wound sutured, was quite helpful, leaving her baby to an old woman's care.
The treatment was mainly for burns and wounds. In spite of insufficient treatment and imperfect sterilization, we experienced few mutilations. A number of flies swarmed around the wounds of serious victims who could not move and big white maggots attacked their eyes, ears and noses. Patients were instructed not to kill them no matter how unpleasant they were. Strange to say, the maggots helped us by eating all the pus and cleaning the wounds.
Unexpected changes came at a time just like that. While I made a round of visits to several farmers' houses for the treatment of serious cases, I came upon a case with strange symptoms. The farmer said that the case had a sudden attack of high fever above 40 degrees Celsius. He was a young soldier and got severely burned on his face and upper left half of his body. The patient sweated like a waterfall. The day before, he was very gay, joking with the nurse, but today his cheeks sank in. It seemed that his condition had undergone a sudden change. There were many purple spots on the normal skin of the right half of his body. I forced his mouth open with a spoon, and saw his tonsils and the mucous membrane in his pharynx was almost black. It stank so strongly that I could only turn my face away. If it had been inflamed, it would account for the high fever. But it was impossible for me to explain the cause of the purple and gangrenous tonsils. I treated his burns and injected cardiatic and antifebrile in haste. Afterwards, I gave instructions of intravenous feeding of Ringer's solution.
It became possible to give transfusions of Ringer's solution to serious cases because a large quantity of it was brought by the supporting party from the Tamatsukuri Branch Hospital the night of the 9th. When I was about to return to the main office, a medic ran after me like the wind. “Come back! He is bleeding.”
I turned back at once knowing that it was the soldier who was in high fever. He was writhing in a pool of blood on the straw mat, bleeding not only from the intestines but also from the eyes, nostrils and mouth.
“What happened to him?” I wondered.
His short-cropped hair fell off, swept away under his palm raised on his head in his pain. Facing this unexpected symptom, my legs stiffened and my hands shivered with fear. I at once touched his pulse, but it was too feeble. The face of the nurse who pressed his arms to keep the injected needle still had turned as pale as death. As soon as he vomited a large quantity of blood from his mouth, he breathed his last before I could do anything.
It was not only I who came across this unusual death, but many doctors who made the rounds of patients also reported similar cases. While we talked about our strange experiences, the condition of many patients took a sudden turn for the worse. Moreover, these cases were not one or two. They fell into critical condition by four here, five there. The doctors seriously thought that this was typhoid fever or dysentery, as it had common symptom of fever and bloody bowel discharge. But no one could explain the gangrenous change in the pharynx mucous membrane, the strange loss of hair or the purple spots. Having such severe symptoms of fever, throat pain, bleeding and depilation, the survivors fell into a dangerous condition in less than an hour. Only a very few of these patients had a narrow escape from death. Injecting Ringer's solution and blood transfusions was considered the most effective treatment.
The survivors became seriously ill, seven or eight at a time and died in the same way. As I look back on it now, those who were irradiated by the same amount of radiation at the same distance from the epicenter fell ill and died according to the laws of nuclear physics, just as irradiated experimental animals do. However, at that time, we did not know that it was caused by an atomic bomb, which Japanese GHQ only referred to as a new type of powerful bomb. We seriously hypothesized that the problem was a kind of dysentery because of the intestinal bleeding, which was so common to the majority of the cases.
Under the command of the Director, autopsies were performed in the dead of night, in secret from the patients and the villagers. It was a dark, rainy night. I laid one of the corpses which had been piled up in the field waiting for cremation on a metal sheet. I cut the abdominal skin with a sharp knife with the help of candlelight. The Director held an umbrella over me. The autopsy was made to study whether or not inflammation was the cause of bleeding in the intestines. We carefully examined the mucous membranes, waving them in water in a bucket, under the light close to it, but no dysentery-like symptom was found.
Before this, Captain Iizuka, an Army Doctor who arrived from the Tamatsukuri Branch Hospital, had devoted himself with his followers to examine blood under a microscope obtained with difficulty in a cave built by a Hesaka working party. As a result of hemogram tests of bone-marrow, he concluded that the survivors presented a peculiar deficiency in the blood?making organ and the distinct symptoms of dehydration. He thought that it was similar to symptoms caused by irradiation of X-rays or radium-rays. So he suggested that complete rest, good nutrition, plenty of liquids, small but repeated transfusions of various vitamin compounds and organ-preparations of liver or adrenal glands, etc. would be useful for treatment. But this treatment was not practical because there was a great confusion in the whole village. And even if we wanted to do so, we could do nothing but treat local burns and injuries or to inject Ringer's solution for serious cases.
After some time, the situation took a new turn, when we heard the rumor that the Navy radio station in Kure had monitored an American radio broadcast stating that an Atomic bomb had been used in Hiroshima. The peculiar syndrome which we had been unable to explain could now be understood as acute radioactive disease causing disorder of the blood-making organ. The more we knew the facts, the more deeply we felt anger for the use of this new nuclear weapon with radioactivity. Even if we had known this before, there would not have been any effective treatment. Someone began to speak about the effective use of vitamin-rich persimmon leaves for this syndrome. The leaves were instantly gathered and used by many survivors with great conviction. The doctors laughed away saying that it was no more than superstition. It was true, however, that it appeared to be effective for many people.
I shall not ever forget the day of August 13. On that day, I came across some strange cases on my way toward the main office. I was feeling some sorrow which was beyond expression, after facing so many deaths of victims.
Mr. Tamura's house was at the corner of an old street in Hakushima-cho which was surrounded by white walls. He led a frugal lonely life with his wife after his three sons had been sent to the front. On the morning of August 6, while he was having breakfast, his precious tea cup was accidentally broken to pieces. He was so fond of good cups that he used to say, “Ordinary cups spoil the taste of tea.” So he went, with nothing on except for a pair of short pants, to the air raid shelter in the garden for another cup. The moment he entered the shelter and closed the thick cover over his head, the bomb exploded. His house collapsed on his wife with a thunderous sound, covering her with shattered pieces of glass and wood. Fire broke out here and there and when he put his head out of the shelter, he saw the flames and clouds of smoke.
“Fire!”
He jumped out and found his wife, unconscious, covered with blood. Dragging her out from the fire, he ran away with her on his back in the flames of Hakushima. When he narrowly arrived at the Kanda River, he felt as if his heart was ready to burst from his chest. The river, reflecting the flames on its surface, looked as if about to blaze up. They passed a sleepless night soaking their bodies half in the river. The next morning, Mr. Tamura crossed over the Nakayama pass toward Hesaka with his wife who had lost her vigor to go on. So they established themselves in the shed of a certain farmer's house. I had been acquainted with them as neighbors since arriving in Hiroshima. That night I pulled out pieces of glass stuck in her body.
Some days later afterwards, Mr. Tamura borrowed a hoe and a cycle trailer and went back to the city under the burning sun. He was wearing nothing but the same pair of short pants. He dug the shelter out of the ruins of his house, which he found with difficulty, and returned with necessary clothings, beddings etc. on a cart. Washing off the dust and sweat at the well-side, he noticed several blisters as big as thumbs on both kneecaps. He did not remember anything unusual on his knees when he had sat down on a tree stump that morning while having a pipe. Neither did he remember having burned himself that day. He felt no pain nor itching. Because he was dead tired, he slept, thinking nothing of it that night.
The next morning, to his surprise, bubbles spread out from ankle to knee as if he had put rubber balloons on his legs. A sanitary soldier who came just to treat his wife removed the secretion in the blisters with a syringe, remarking that they were queer for sunburn. The edema recurred in short time. Mr. Tamura extracted the fluid with a needle by himself. The swelling and removal of fluid continued for five days; as often as he removed the fluid, it recurred like a living thing. Victims who were dying with strange symptoms began to increase in number, and he began to feel uneasy. So he asked me to examine him soon. I could not respond to his request, because I was hard pressed with life-threatening patients.
One evening, I found some free time and hurried to see him. When I entered the shed, I saw his wife broken-down crying, holding her husband. Mr. Tamura had died in a pool of blood. Just that noon, I saw his smile and heard him say, waving his hand, “Please drop in on your way back. I will make good tea.” In the afternoon that day Mr. Tamura sweated all over his body and scratched his neck, complaining of pain in his throat. “I was in the shelter, so I never met with Pika-don (which people named the atomic bomb). For all that, my hair impossible.” Under his palm, the hair fell down as if it had been swept away.
Why did Mr. Tamura who did not receive direct radiation in the shelter which had been made so carefully, die with the same symptoms as those victims who were directly irradiated? A fairly long time was necessary before we could solve this riddle.
Though many wounded and burned persons got better little by little and became able to even show a smile, some unexpectedly died by threes and fours every day. The doctor's wife in question who got sutured on her breast and helped us diligently also passed away. It was very pitiful to see the baby crying for milk holding his mother's body. Everyone cried.
The young mother who had pressed me to treat her dead baby also followed her. A few days before, I came across her on the village road. She stood on the roadside and bent her head politely, holding two buckets with her both hands. She thanked me for the kindness I had shown to her lost baby. She did not complain about her loss. I was just pleased that she regained her strength of healthy spirit and had overcome her grief, seeing her clean eyes on the ugly burnt face. But, sad to say, I heard of her death soon after.
Before long, August 15 came.
I listened to the radio, which informed us of the Imperial edict about the “defeat,” in the schoolroom that escaped collapse. Present were the Hospital Director Motoyoshi, who wore his military decorations, and the schoolmaster in full black dress. I understood that Japan had surrendered, from the several words which I could narrowly catch from the jarring and grating radio. I got angrier for this too-late determination to surrender, than feeling regret for the Japanese defeat. The face of Second Lieutenant Kondo came into my mind, who wrote me that now was, indeed, the chance to begin to make effort to finish the war. But I shook my head and stood up, thinking that it was not the time to think about that now.
Though I was an Army Doctor, I was also an active service officer. Naturally, I must take upon myself the responsibility to have led the war to defeat. The Director turned his face to me as if he wanted to say something, but I went out of the room at once. In the village, I had too much work to do as a physician before I had a talk with him on this. Though the survivors escaped an early death, the death-rate from atomic disease did not slow down. The fire blazed in the crematory day and night, but it was not sufficient for the number of bodies which increased every day, and corpses were left on the foot-path in the rice field, side-by-side, waiting for their turn, breeding maggots.
Toward the end of August, the number of newly-arrived survivors declined. Earlier there was anxiety about increasing population, but at this stage it began to decrease rapidly. Some were able to seek refuge with their relatives, but the greater part of them were transferred to the Branch Hospital in the Japanese seaside district by an extra Geibi Line train. To my sorrow, I could not forget that numberless people had changed into light smoke, and they disappeared into the sky of Hesaka.
One day near the end of August, a couple passed away. I still remember it clearly. He was a Sergeant Major and belonged to the adjacent regiment of the Hiroshima Military Hospital. He was a classmate of Sergeant Ozaki and one of my friends. In June that year he was permitted out of the barracks to live in the city. So, he called his fiancee to him from his home town, Kumamoto, and they were happily married three days before the bombing. On that morning, both them were bombed simultaneously, he on his way to GHQ and she in her kitchen. Fortunately they did not die. By chance, they escaped to Hesaka separately and lay on the ground of the primary school. Then without knowledge of each other, they were brought together, because the patients who separated them died and were carried out. For a while, they did not recognize each other, because their faces were cruelly burned and deformed. In time, they recovered their physical strength and were able to move a little. No one knew which of them found out first, but they recognized each other by their voices. They were overjoyed with their chance meeting, weeping in each other's arms. This heartwarming episode was known to all people immediately. It was the best topic to give hope to live to the people who were tortured by hellish pain. Encouraged by all the well-wishers and co-sufferers in the village, it appeared that their physical strength was recovering day by day, except for ugly keroid scars, and the couple gained confidence in themselves to go back to their hometown, Kumamoto.
On that morning, the Sergeant Major visited me with his wife who wore a yukata, a present form some hearty villagers. They were ready to return to their hometown on the Sanin Line. Though it was usual to go to Kumamoto on the Sanyo Line, all its carriages were filled with disarmed and demobilized soldiers from every district at the time of defeat. So it was quite impossible for the wounded hibakusha to get on the jam-packed trains. He lowered his head to me many times saying, “I'm going to work to grow rice with all my might and mind.”
Filled with tears, he was about to go out the door with his wife but stumbled against the threshold. Suddenly, he knelt down holding his mouth with his hand. Blood overflowed through his fingers. This occurred in a minute fraction of a second. I was filled with pity looking on the back of his wife, who held on to her husband carried out on a bloody stretcher. He collapsed on the bed and began to develop a high fever.
People believed that it's over once bleeding begins, but we continued to treat him with our best efforts. Whenever he tore at his hair, it fell out. His wife, astounded and stricken, was crying and clinging to her husband. Before long her tears were also replaced by blood, and her hair too began to fall out early in the morning, when a peak on the opposite bank of the Ota River began to shine with morning light. The nurse, who took her hand to feel her pulse, was surprised. Her temperature stood over 39. In spite of the whole night of nursing, the Sergeant Major died the next morning, and as soon his wife followed her husband.
4- Record by an Army Doctor
This sentence is licensed under the Hesaka public hall.
