Free First Into Nagasaki by George Weller Page B

years around the Mitsui mine that the Japanese were just using Americans to remove the pillars from an old mine, leaving tunnels unsupported. Accidents were the natural result of such dangerous work.”
    James Voelcker (Wetmore, Texas):
“In February I got so weak with diarrhea I couldn’t work, and mine overseers handed me over to the military who threw me into the
aeso—
that’s Japanese for guardhouse. It was cold and the Japanese made me carry water for them. My feet were always wet and finally froze. Gangrene set in and an Australian doctor had to amputate all my toes and both feet.”
    Kenneth Vick (Oklahoma City):
“I’ve been able to run the camp toolroom, working above ground, because I got hit by three machine gun bullets on Bataan.”
    Air Corps Sergeant Ben Lowe (Knoxville, Tennessee),
captured on Bataan, who lost his right leg halfway between the hip and the knee: “Our Buntai Joe—that means overseer—refused to go in under this bad coal face, but sent my crew in to dig. When the coal fell the first nuggets knocked me down, then the whole face buried me. Three weeks later Captain Hewlett amputated my leg.”
    Alfred Schnitzer (Portsmouth, Virginia),
captured at Corregidor: “I’ve always tried to give the Japanese my best, and when the military put me in the guardhouse, the sentries refused to punish me.”
    Sergeant James Justice (Gaffney, South Carolina),
taken on Bataan: “I was lifting a heavy coal trough when the foreman began yelling at me. I made some remark in English. He hit me with a piece of coal. I knocked out two teeth on him. He reported me to the military, who slapped me and beat me with a board. Captain Hewlett got me declared unfit for underground work. Two months ago the camp commander beat my head with a two-by-four for not replacing a door after a typhoon blew it in.” Justice is wearing a bandage on his head, where Captain Hewlett took out four stitches.
    Earl Bryant (Anaheim, California):
“I saw what might have been the first atomic bomb, in the direction of Hiroshima. It was a white cloud, big at the top and narrow at the bottom, on what seemed a bed of black smoke.”
    Corporal Dale Frantz (Canton, Ohio):
“I missed Nagasaki’s bombing, but I saw the cloud in the opposite direction, toward Hiroshima, on the first bombing. The cloud started small but built up high and fast. It was pure white, with a pinkish tinge. I could see airplanes circling between me and the cloud and suppose now that they were photographic planes. At the time we were puzzled by the whiteness of the smoke and supposed that it must be from a chemical plant.”
    Charles Butler (Smithdale, Mississippi):
“It was a clear day, with other clouds all high strata. We could see this unnatural thunderhead with straight sides instead of being pyramidal-shaped, and airplanes seemed be circling around watching it.”
    George O’Brien (Wascott, Wisconsin):
“I saw a reddish glow in the sky over Nagasaki and at first I thought it was a fire after the bombing. But it lasted too long for just Japanese shacks, and I was puzzled.”
    Joseph Collins (San Antonio),
captured on Corregidor: “The next morning after the noonday bombing of Nagasaki, I climbed on a waterboiler platform with Stanley Peterson of Los Angeles, and we could see flames over in Nagasaki, leaping up and dying and rising again like an oil fire, but with a peculiar absence of black smoke.”
    Corporal Lee Dale (Walnut Creek, California),
who visited the Nagasaki atomic bombsite: “Those flattened buildings made you want to cry, not on account of the lives lost, but because of the destruction involved.”
    “T HE J APANESE L ITTLE T HEATER G IVES A R ED C ROSS B ENEFIT ”
    Allied Prison Camp #17, Omuta, Kyushu
    A cold brook runs through the tunnel of the Mitsui coal mine at Omuta, on Kyushu, but the air 1,440 feet underground is thick and hot. Your feet are ankle-deep in the rushing, icy water; at the same time your head swims with fatigue, and the