Free First Into Nagasaki by George Weller Page A

dangerous to operate because their tunnels’ underpinnings have been removed to obtain the last vestiges of coal.
    Another Chinese camp is known to exist somewhere in Kyushu and is being sought by a party headed by Medical Warrant Officer Houston Sanders, of Hartwell, Georgia.
    Omuta, Japan—Wednesday, September 12, 1945 0230 hours
    Allied Prison Camp #17, Omuta, Kyushu
    For hundreds of Americans held in Kyushu prison camps, the atomic bomb bursting over Nagasaki in full view was a signal of their liberation from serfdom in Baron Mitsui’s cruel and dangerous coal mine. Some Bataan and Corregidor prisoners were worked to death here. Captain Robert W. Schott, an energetic dentist from What Cheer, Iowa, has succeeded the Japanese commander. Here are G.I.s’ comments on their coal mine slavery, and on the bomb ending it.
    James Small (Gate City, Virginia):
“The mine was hard not because of the work, but because the Japanese insisted on our carrying impossible burdens. Many times we took beatings just in order to have two men carry one roof support.”
    Sergeant James Bennett (Monongahela, Pennsylvania):
“I lost my thumb trying to protect my detail from being beaten up by a Japanese soldier. Rushing things to make the Jap cease his beating, I fell forward and a mine car rolling forward caught my hand.”
    Corporal Junious Carroll (Thornton, Washington),
who had his hearing impaired by an explosion on Corregidor, has lost his left leg at the shin: “A Japanese overman borrowed my cap lantern, leaving me to go through the tunnel to get another. Seeing no light where I was, the mine train ran over me.”
    Joseph Valencourt (Lawrence, Massachusetts):
“After the atomic bomb I saw a cloud lit up like a sunset over Nagasaki. But not understanding, I paid no attention.”
    Corporal Gerald Wilson (Clovis, New Mexico):
“The atomic bomb cloud looked like a giant thunderhead. It kept boiling, getting larger.”
    Corporal Richard Burke (Chicago):
“The atomic bomb cloud seemed to me like the dying embers of a sunset, but all in one spot.”
    Elmer Swabe (San Francisco),
captured on Wake Island: “I’ve been in Japan for three years and had just one letter—from my wife.”
    Sergeant Gail Herring (Los Angeles):
“Most of my outfit, the 60th Coast Artillery, have had at least one letter since being captured on Corregidor. But I’ve had none.”
    Robert Fortune (San Francisco),
captured on Wake: “I worked for twenty-six months in a steel mill at Yahata near the camp at Moji and got pneumonia and beriberi. But since coming here in January I’ve gained some weight.”
    Larry Sandoval (Albuquerque),
his right leg missing two inches from the knee, is one among the American prisoners who paid for the Japanese insistence that this old and dangerous mine be exploited. “I was building a supporting wall opposite the coal face when the ceiling came down.”
    Robert Case (West Terre Haute, Indiana)
is another victim of Baron Mitsui’s enterprise, with his left leg gone between knee and ankle. “I got caught in a coal-carrying transmission chain, and was carried into the motor.”
    Edgar van Imwagen (Palmyra, Ohio),
with his left leg amputated two inches above the knee: “The Japs always shoved us in against the coal face without testing whether it would hold, because they wanted to not lose any time. Last December 12th, when I weighed 100 pounds after forty-five days in the mine, the overseer shoved us into an untried coal face. The roof’s pressure, being unbraced, blew the wall in on us. I was bending over, shoveling, and got buried completely. A half hour later the Japanese doctor took off my leg, which healed in sixteen days. A whole bunch of Koreans were buried alive the year before in the same place, and are still there. When Japs came to my bed at Christmas and offered me a gift of two cigarettes, I just lay there and laughed.”
    Sergeant Calvin Elton (Dividend, Utah):
“I live in a mining town and I knew for all my two