'SUDDENLY, THERE WAS A TERRIFIC RUSH OF AIR'

A few months after the atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki,

Denis Warner met 24 Australians who had lived through it. All

but six are still alive, and still remember what happened

Sydney AT 11.02 A.M. on 9 August 1945, Gunner Reg McConnell, of the 2/1st Heavy Bat- tery, AIF, was between two of the prisoner- of-war billets in the centre of the city of Nagasaki when someone said to him, 'Look at those little parachutes coming down.' He looked up a split second before the 'Fat Man', as the Nagasaki bomb was known, razed the prison camp and much of the City.

Another Australian, Sergeant Jack Johnson, of No 1 Squadron, RAAF, was also outside, well away from any air-raid shelter. A wireless operator-gunner, he had seen action with No 1 Squadron's Hudson bombers against the Japanese at Kota Bharu, on the north-eastern coast of Malaya, sinking one Japanese transport 90 minutes before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He, too, saw the parachutes, fastened in a triangular fashion. Out of curiosity, he watched as they drifted down.

With him was a third Australian, Bom- bardier Frank Fitzmaurice, of the 2/1st Heavy Battery.

A fourth, Private Alan Chick, of the 2/40th Battalion, was sitting on the skeletal framework of a new building in the camp. Earlier in the morning he had been work- ing in the foundry of the huge Mitsubishi works but had been sent back to camp along with other prisoners after several air- raid alerts. He was too busy chatting with a fellow prisoner, an Indonesian, to pay any attention to the approaching drone of a single Superfortress bomber.

When the Fat Man exploded, McConnell 'got blown along by the blast like a sheet of paper until I ended against a brick wall, which collapsed on me'. He expected more 'eggs' to come and waited there for a time. He was a bit dazed, but when nothing hap- pened he stood up to have a wash in a tank. 'As far as you could see, there was nothing standing,' he said, 'It was just flat like a pancake.'

Johnson described the Fat Man's flash as like a giant magnesium detonation accom- panied by a blinding white light. A second Or so passed before the blast hit and he dropped to the ground by the side of a building. 'The next thing I knew the roof had collapsed on top of me, pinning me down.' Apart from a bruised leg bone and some other cuts and bruises, he was unhurt. Chick was conscious only of a blinding flash of white light followed by intense darkness as he and his Indonesian companion and the framework of the building on which they were sitting were blown to the ground.

Today, 50 years later, the wonder of this story is not that the four men lived to tell their tale, but that McConnell, Fitzmaurice and Chick are still alive. Johnson died only a few months ago, at the age of 85.

I first became aware that these men and 20 of their Australian companions had been under the Nagasaki bomb when I was in Manila in the Philippines in September 1945. Two had been taken there for medi- cal treatment on the first leg of their jour- ney home from prison camp. One, Lance-Corporal John Marshall, of the 2/40th Battalion, was standing in the passage of a building when he heard the drone of the B-29 overhead. He looked out of the window and saw the three parachutes carrying the bomb high in the air above the city. The bomb drifted slowly down, the parachutes swinging in the breeze. 'Suddenly there was a terrific rush of air, like the noise of an express train rac- ing past a deserted station,' he told me.

Many of the men in the American hospi- tal in Manila were living skeletons. They tired easily. It often seemed too much of an imposition to question them. But Marshall, who was suffering from a broken collar- bone, wanted to talk.

'I had time to run and crouch beside a wall before the building collapsed in a heap of rubble and iron. This was accompanied by a blinding flash of yellow light, which scorched the paint off all buildings, tore the foliage from the trees, and killed every- one who had not taken cover. Every bit of steel and every building in the devastated area — which was about four miles long and one mile wide — seemed to fold up in a flash, but, strangely enough, reinforced concrete seemed to resist the bomb.'

As Marshall struggled through the rub- ble, Nagasaki burst into flames. Beginning near the centre of the damage, the fires spread quickly through the other ruined buildings. Marshall thought there was only one thing to do — get away as quickly as possible. Despite his broken collar-bone, and in great pain, he joined others running from the fires.

With Marshall in hospital was Sergeant Peter McGrath-Kerr, also of the 2/40th Battalion. Like others, he had been sent back to camp on 4 August because of repeated air-raid alerts. He was sitting on his bunk reading a book when the bomb went off. Unconscious for five days, he remembered nothing of what had hap- pened. When I saw him in Manila, he was emaciated and very weak. He had radiation burns on one of his hands and five broken ribs. A medical orderly asked me not to spend too long talking to him.

'I still think the Japanese are making too much of the whole thing in an effort to gain sympathy,' he said. 'Everyone who was there agrees that if you were not in the direct line of the flash you are OK.' (This was scarcely conventional wisdom, even then.) A couple of months later I was in Nagasaki with Marshall's vivid description of the devastation very much in mind. It was hard to believe that this awful place had ever been part of a great city.

I climbed one of the hills overlooking Nagasaki to a hospital with a view over the twisted Mitsubishi works five minutes' walk from where Marshall and McGrath-Kerr had had such a miraculous escape. The burned-out hospital remained intact but empty. Skeletons of dead horses lay on the approaches. Even the Red Cross signs on the hospital roof had melted in the heat. The imprint of a man's bare foot had burned into the concrete at the entrance to the hospital. From the roof, the scene below was of a wasteland.

The human wasteland was worse. Radia- tion had ripped off the hair of men and women. Numberless children carried fear- ful red weals which foretold their early deaths.

In many ways the bomb had been highly selective. Some houses less than a kilome- tre from the areas with the worst damage remained unaffected. Yet 5km away from ground zero across the mountain slopes, the blast had torn the glasses from a man's nose and shattered them metres away.

The casualties were fewer in Nagasaki than they had been in Hiroshima — about 35,000 killed immediately and 25,000 wounded or injured. If these figures were much smaller than the loss of life in Tokyo caused by the first fire-bombing raid, when 100,000 died, Nagasaki and what happened there were not easy to forget.

The epicentre of the blast was 1,750 metres from the middle of the camp and at an angle of 16 degrees elevation. This meant that the camp was positioned to get the full blast of the bomb. Yet incredibly, it seemed to me, no Australians were killed, and, even more incredibly, only six of the 24 had died by 1984.

On the day the bomb dropped, prison life began as usual. Some worked in the machine rooms, while others were assigned to dig an immense shelter in the hillside. They believed — probably with good rea- son — that this would be their tomb if the Americans invaded Kyushu.

The Australians on the shift working on the air-raid shelter-tomb had finished work at seven o'clock in the morning of 9 August and were back in the prison compound with all the others. They were lucky. The replacement shift at the shelter suffered fearful injuries from the bomb.

None of the prisoners had heard any- thing about Hiroshima, and their immedi- ate reaction to the bomb was incredulity that one could have caused such havoc.

Johnson was one of the first to recover from the blast. He managed to extricate himself from the remains of the roof that was pinning him down and made his way through the debris of the billets, looking for anyone who might have been trapped. 'I was searching there,' he said, 'when I saw a couple of boots sticking out.' They belonged to the unconscious McGrath- Kerr who was still attached to them under the rubble. With the fires spreading fast, Johnson worked feverishly to get him out and then left him with a couple of Dutch prisoners who were medical order- lies.

Some of the bomb's effects were immedi- ately apparent. 'A Dutch fellow I knew had all the skin on his face blown off,' Johnson said. 'He looked like a blown-up catfish, with a face the size of a soccer ball. People who had been working on the air-raid shel- ter and had taken off their shirts lost their skin. It peeled off like a potato removed from its jacket.'

'Psychiatric care in the community.' Gunner Murray Jobling, of the 1st Anti- Tank Battery, was having a smoke in the billet with McGrath-Kerr when he heard the noise of the approaching B-29. Since the air-raid sirens did not sound, he assumed that the plane was Japanese. Next moment he was hurtling through the air and landed on his feet on the floor below.

Outside it was like looking into the interior of a furnace of molten metal. What had been the rows of the barracks were just twisted piles of timber and debris. All that remained were burnt rice pots in the kitchen.

The Japanese guards, who were as shak- en by the bomb as the Australians, told the prisoners to leave the camp and head for the hills. A guard accompanied Chick and several other prisoners, who found a horse harnessed to a cart, commandeered it and set off. When fallen trees blocked the way, they turned the horse loose and continued on foot.

Jobling was shocked by what he saw. 'People were just wandering aimlessly,' he said. 'Hundreds had all their exposed skin burnt from their bodies. Hundreds more had blackened skin hanging from them in strips. Others had blisters under the black- ened skin. The liquid under the blisters could be measured in pints. I could see it sloshing about as they walked.'

McConnell joined the group who went overnight to the hills. He returned to the camp the following day and spent about three weeks there, his back covered by abscesses which came up like boils. 'We had a Dutch doctor in the camp but when I went to him he said he had no medical sup- plies of any sort,' said McConnell. 'If you are willing to try it,' he told McConnell, 'I'll cut them off for you.' McConnell was will- ing. The doctor bled the boils and cut them off. Eventually the wounds healed.

On 10 August, when the prisoners went back through the ruined area to the billets, they saw hundreds of burned bodies among the wreckage. Just how fortunate the Aus- tralians were became apparent at this time from the fate of the Chinese prisoners-of- war in adjoining billets. Johnson had seen a couple escape, but when he returned to help with the cremation of the Dutch camp commander, he saw that the Chinese billets were deep in corpses.

It was one thing for the Australians to have escaped immediate death, but what of the after-effects? Twenty-four is a very small sample, but in 1984 I found that the death rate among the group had been lower than one might expect in any com- munity group of the same size.

Two of the 24 had died of cancer of the stomach not long after their return to Aus- tralia, but that might have been caused by the diet the men had in prison camp. None had developed leukaemia. One had died in a boating accident. In all there had been six deaths, including that of John Marshall. None was attributable to radiation.

'You hear a lot about these atomic bomb drops,' said Hooper, a hobby farmer at Goorambat in Victoria, who had been stunned by a falling building in Nagasaki, 'but the percentage of people who died from the effects of that atomic bomb is no higher than any of the other chaps.' This was confirmed by the Australian Army. 'According to our records people, who are daily maintaining the details of servicemen and ex-servicemen, the figure of 25 per cent mortality is the lowest of any World War H unit,' says a spokesman.

What, then, is the explanation? Ameri- can atomic scientists who investigated the effects of the two bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki determined that one corner of the Nagasaki camp was 1,420 metres from the epicentre of the bomb, and that anyone there would have been exposed to 53 units of radiation. At the most distant corner, they would have been exposed to 49 units.

Dr Peter Ilbery, then assistant director- general of the Australian Department of Health, and a former professor of radiolo- gy, had carried out tests on chromosomes to determine the amount of radiation that blood cells could accept before damage occurred. He discovered that this was 50 units. From the position of the Australian billets in Nagasaki, 50 units of radiation was what they would have been exposed to.

About the time I was making my inquiries in 1984, the Department of Veter- ans' Affairs asked Dr Ilbery to investigate the effects of radiation on the former pris- oners-of-war. Except in one case, he was not able to discern any change in individu- als' chromosomes, although some change was noticeable when he compared the results for the whole group. He was sur- prised not to find more.

Many years had passed between their exposure to the bomb and his tests, so no record existed of the amount of damage that might have resulted immediately from the blast. Dr Ilbery's conclusion was no less interesting. His experiments in exposing blood samples to high levels of radiation, ranging from 100 to 600 units, revealed that over time either the chromosome changes were repaired or the damaged cells were eliminated. 'It goes to show that radiation damage can be repaired by time,' he said.

But how did the Australians survive? 'They were lucky,' he said. 'They were all under shelter, and the 50 units of radiation was a relatively small dose. Nevertheless, if they had been in the open they would have died.'

Yet at least one of the prisoners, Chick, was very much in the open, and three oth- ers, Johnson, McConnell and Fitzmaurice, were only under shelter caused by the blast when buildings collapsed on top of them.

Perhaps Chick, seemingly the luckiest of all, was a beneficiary of the bomb's selec- tivity.

As for Peter McGrath-Kerr, the only man known to have suffered radiation burns, treatment cleared them up. He went back to Nagasaki as a guest of honour of the city when it commemorated the 35th anniversary of the bomb in 1980. He died in 1986 of a rare disease, amyloidosis, which had no known connection with his radiation problems in 1945.

Jack Johnson stayed on in the Air Force until he reached retirement age, after which he worked as quality-control officer for a company making parachutes in Mel- bourne. He died peacefully in February this year.

Alan Chick remained in the Army after the war and went back to Japan with the occupation forces, where, in 1952, he mar- ried a Japanese girl. He also made a return visit to Nagasaki. He then returned to Tas- mania, and worked for many years in a sawmill and dairy in St Helens on the east coast before retiring to live in Victoria. At 75, he has had several heart attacks and ulcers, but doesn't know if the bomb was to blame. Reg McConnell, now 76, has had medi- cal problems in recent years. He attributes them to radiation, although repatriation doctors blame malnutrition in prison camp. Whatever the cause, the nerve centre in the top part of his spine has been affected. 'I just shuffle along,' he told me. 'I have to be careful that I don't fall.'

Before he lost the full use of his legs, McConnell built a two storey-house. Later, he had to install a lift to go to his upstairs bedroom, and he expected government help. He was disappointed.

Eric Hooper, still at Goorambat, is in fairly good health. Frank Fitzmaurice, who was blinded temporarily either by the blast or the impact of the falling building, retired from the building trade 17 years ago. He has some health problems, none of them serious. He is 77. His six children, and those of the others who survived the Nagasaki blast, show no signs of after- effects. Murray Jobling later returned to Nagasaki to make a documentary and in Japan met the pilot of the plane that dropped the Fat Man. Now 76, Jobling complains of arthritis and old age.

They appear today to be the only sur- vivors of the original 24. An unusually high mortality rate? Apparently not. According to Bamboo and Barbed Wire, the official organ of the Ex-prisoners-of-war Associa- tion of Australia, only 17 of the 72 original Australian survivors from the Tamahoko Maru were still alive in February. My inquiries indicate that this may be a slight under-estimation but, remarkably, those who survived the bomb seem to have lived longer than those who were spared its blast.

This is adapted from Denis Warner's Wake Me If There's Trouble: An Australian cor- respondent at the front line — Asia at war and peace 1944-1964, published by Penguin (Australia).