大象传媒

It was glorious weather when we arrived here and except for being pretty cold at night it was quite pleasant.

The roads ashore were in pretty poor condition and had a thick layer of dust on them, so by the time one had been shore half an hour one was coated in it.

Kure is not much of a place now as it has been bombed very badly in fact all centre of the town ahs gone but the Japs are beginning to build wooden houses on top of the rubble.

The docks on the whole had been demolished and every where was in a terrible mess.

The town lies on a small flat plain surrounded by hills, these are a maze of tunnels which are store houses and so deep are they under ground that I should imagine it is impossible for any bombing to damage them. Dozens of submarines lie on the slips here and the harbour abounds with Japanese ships of all sorts and sizes.

During our second week here we went over to 鈥淗iroshima鈥� to see for ourselves the damage caused by the Atomic bomb. We boarded the train at Kure and there was a reserved coach for allied personnel. The trains are very like British ones as also the stations.

Hiroshima is about half an hour and a half run along the coast and as the mountains run right down to the sea the line passes through a score of tunnels, alongside each of these tunnels is built another tunnel which appear to be ammunition dumps and such. After about an hours run we began to run into the outskirts Hiroshima and here the train slowed down the reason for that soon became apparent to us as the bridges we crossed over had all been damaged and the last one we crossed was nothing more that the rails supported by the piles, all the structure of the bridge had disappeared.

Hiroshima was in a terrible state as the pictures show, very few buildings reminded standing and those that were, were blasted beyond repair, a very queer thing that struck me was that a large number of factory chimneys were still standing, I suppose due to the fact that they were round smooth surfaces and the blast deflected around them.

All other places had been ripped away from the foundations, and metal work had been semi-molten and had drooped over like a broken flower stem, especially lamp standards and the like.

A queer thing was that the opera house which according to the Japs was in the centre of the area in which the bomb burst was the building with the least damage done to it, as the photographs show, the dome remains, minus the glass. The Japanese are rapidly building on the sight though and by the time we sail from here I should imagine there will be very little evidence of the colossal damage done.

It was very interesting to se this waste that had once been a large city, one has to see a thing like this to believe it, the damage done is beyond imagination, glass from windows has melted with the heat set up and is now set in grotesque masses welded together as they cooled.

One place had evidently been a brewery and hundreds to bottles littered the ground welded together in bunches. Trees have all been scorched to death and are blackened and twisted, and there is an uncanny quiet overhanging the place.

The Jap I bought the snaps off summed it up very well in the few words he spoke in English he said 鈥淗iroshima there-big flash-big bang 鈥� all gone鈥�

Most of the Japs speak a small amount of English some are quite good at it, especially the younger ones.

Another interesting but very queer thing that was bought to my notice at Hiroshima was a large building which had been some sort of hall and had concrete pillars leading up to it, with steps at the entrance, on one of these pillars a very strange site is to be seen for there on one of the pillars is what looks like a dark shadow, its not so much the shadow but the fact that the shadow is the exact shape of a persons body where he or she has been leaning on the pillar at the time the bomb dropped, also there is the same sort of dark shape on one of the steps where somebody has been sitting on it, whether these strange phenomena鈥檚 were caused by the terrific heat generated by the explosion which may have bleached the concrete a vivid white and the part where the two person were was protected from this heat by their bodies so leaving it a darker shade behind them, or whether their bodies were blasted into the concrete I could not say. Whichever it was the outline of their bodies is there on the concrete for anybody to see.

鈥楾his story was submitted to the People鈥檚 war site by Jim Salveson of the CSV Action Desk 大象传媒 Radio Stoke. On behalf of Elizabeth Adams and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site鈥檚 terms and conditions.鈥�

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