I was in Lincoln, Nebraska on 6 August, 1945 transferring from B-24s to the Queen of the Sky a B29, when another B29 the Enola Gay, piloted by 30 year old Col Paul Warfield Tibbets, dropped “ Little Boy” on Hiroshima. Three days later on 9 August 1945, 25 year old Major Chuck Sweeney piloting Bocks Car, dropped “Fat Man” on Nagasaki. I was sent home on a delay-en route and then to Japan for the occupation.

Upon our arrival in Yokohama we went to Irumagawa Air Base northwest of Tokyo, and shortly we left for Fukuoka, the fifth largest city in Japan, on Kyushu, the southernmost island.

We were riding on a 42” gauge track civilian train with sparse accommodations. Most of the passengers were Japanese. They were cordial, polite, pleasant, and interesting. Many of them spoke some English, and it was just enough to communicate. All along the way we found the people to be inquisitive and at least somewhat friendly until we came to one city – Hiroshima.

We slowly rolled into the huge rail yard on the northeast corner of Hiroshima. We knew very little about the atomic bomb at that time except for the fact that a single bomb had killed thousands of people. We creaked to a halt opposite a station platform where a number of grim faced people were standing. One boy in particular stood out. He was a teenager with red hair and combined Japanese/American features a reminder that some of our people had long-standing connections with the Japanese. No one spoke they just stared expressionless at our small group of Army Air Force Americans. On the opposite side (north) of our train was the rusting hulk of a steam locomotive buried cab down with the front end, about half of its length, sticking out of the ground almost perpendicular. How could this be? Why wasn’t that engine just blown over on its side? We would not know for several years that “Little Boy” the first atomic bomb used in combat was dropped from 32,700 feet and intentionally detonated at an altitude of 1,800 ft above the center of the city. An explosive force equivalent to13 kiloton of TNT had pushed downward on that locomotive, pushing the cab into the ground. Around three dozen reinforced concrete buildings that were still standing were irreparably cracked, and some near the hypocenter (the point under which a nuclear blast occurs) were driven into the ground as much as two feet.

Our train was parked on a siding that was almost exactly one mile from the hypocenter, and the tracks had followed an arc of about one third of a circle around the north side of the city. The blast had destroyed much of those tracks, and a very temporary single track had been laid on an unstable roadbed. Trains could only creep along that stretch of track. Because many trains were waiting on both the east and west ends, we remained parked for three or four hours until it was our turn to go. That is when I began to see the extent of the destruction. Although the debris had been pushed out of the streets almost immediately, the land around the center of the city remained piled with debris. Tarpaper shacks had sprung up all over the outlying areas near the rail line. Some had cleared small areas for gardens but most were surrounded with deep rubble. The stench of burning charcoal, cooking fish, and decomposing garbage was nauseating. The rest of the trip was uneventful. It was interesting when we passed under the sea in a tunnel going from Hikoshima on the Southernmost tip of the main island of Kyushu. The next city was Kokura, which had been the primary target for the second atomic bomb. Due to smoke from a firebomb raid two days prior on the steel mills at Yawata obscuring the arsenal target area and a shortage of fuel the B-29 Bock scar went for the second target, Nagasaki. Today the name of Kokura cannot be found on the map, as it became a part of Yawata to the west. I have three WW II air navigation maps that do not show Kokura. Later I took aerial and ground photos at Yawata and saw that Yawata had suffered severe bomb damage.

We arrived at Fukuoka and were assigned to Headquarters Squadron, Fifth Air Force, Fifth Fighter Command where we took over operations from the set-up group. They were sent home to the states for discharge. I was immediately placed back on flying status, and as head photographer, I did most of the flying. I was soon assigned to photograph both atom bomb damaged cities. Little did I dream that I would be one of the few photographers to take low altitude aerials of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My first A-Bomb city to photograph was Nagasaki, which had been destroyed by the second bomb, the plutonium  “Fat Man”. On August 9, 1945 Colonel Fulcher was personally going to fly me in a Stinson L-5 observation plane. Another high ranking officer who was a friend of Col Fulcher and happened to be at the field, wanted to go along. Since the L-5 is a tandem two seater , The Col authorized my regular pilot to prepare a second L-5 while he and his friend flew on ahead. I had never driven a truck much less a semi-trailer fuel tanker, but I managed to get it started, circled tight and ended up right by the nose of the L-5. Within half an hour we were off the ground. We circled Nagasaki at 500 to 1000 feet altitude while I took 39 Views.

Nagasaki was a major port with one of the world’s largest shipbuilding yards. Mitsubishi Steel and Arms works was at the southern end of the industrial valley, and the Mitsubishi Mutations plant was to the North. The Hypocenter was in between, about 150 yards north of Mitsubishi Steel, which was the aiming point. There were also four big Mitsubishi aircraft plants in the area. The shipbuilding yards were far to the south on the west side of the harbor, and the city business district was on the east side of the harbor with the residential area farther east in a pocket of small mountains. Those mountains had protected the greater portion of the population and reduced the death toll. Pre bomb population had been 195,000. Fat Man was dropped from about 32,000 and detonated at 1,750 feet with a force of 23kilotons of TNT. Approximately 36,000 were killed and injuries later claimed 39,000 more lives.

As we circled I noticed that an area about a mile across was completely bare except for a few concrete reinforced buildings and the rusted twisted metal hulk of the Mitsubishi Steel Plant. I later learned that the Mitsubishi Munitions plant had designed and built the special torpedo’s that sunk our ships at Pearl Harbor. Most torpedoes dropped from planes skimming low over the water sank 70 feet before returning to the surface. Pearl Harbor was only 40 feet deep. With more powerful motors and depth pressure controlled elevators, the special torpedoes maxed out at 35 feet and none were lost to the harbor floor.

Even the steel superstructure of the steel shipyards far to the south was turned to red rust. The business district across the harbor had been leveled, but the homes in the residential area to the east still stood, closely packed together protected by a 1,400 foot high mountain to the North.

Upon returning to Itazuki Airfield we noted that the Col. wasn’t back yet. It took almost an hour before he showed up. He told us that he was flying low, forgot to turn on the carburetor heat, the gas line froze up, and the engine quit running. He found that he was heading almost straight into a runway, which our engineers had made within a city block of the hypocenter. We had not noticed them waving their arms at us but my pictures show their plane parked beside another on the ground.

The next mission was to Hiroshima. This time we chose to use a Canadian built Noorduyn Norsman, a rather large single engine plane. We had two of them, but one was down with an engine problem. The normal 550 HP engine in the plane we took had been replaced with a 500HP engine so we were 50 HP short for maximum performance. Flying the plane was a Command Pilot with thousands of hours of flying time. We also had a co-pilot and two or three others who were back with me on canvas seats that ran fore and aft on both sides of the plane. As we approached Hiroshima, I took off my parachute and placed it on the floor in front of the door to kneel on because the window in the door was to high to properly position the K-20 aerial camera.

Hiroshima had been the target of the first atomic bomb, a uranium gun type called “Little Boy” on 6 August 1945. My photographs clearly show the two-mile diameter circle of maximum destruction where 100,000 people were incinerated instantly by the searing heat (one hundred million degrees at the bomb’s core and 5400 degrees below at the hypocenter). They also show the six-mile diameter circle of radiation, which continued to kill as many as 100,000 more over a period of many years. We had miscalculated the area of radiation. In later years Norman F. Ramsey who had been senior scientist of the bomb design group explained: “The people who made the decision to drop the bomb made it on the assumption that all casualties would be standard explosion casualties … The region over which there would have been radiation injury was to be a much smaller one than the region of so-called 100% blast kill.. Any person with radiation damage would have been killed with a brick first”.

It was a bumpy ride but things were going OK until I took picture number forty-one of the moat where an old castle had stood. We were at about 800 ft (the length of two city blocks) above the ground when we hit a severe downdraft. The left wing flipped down and I found myself with my back pinned to the ceiling on the opposite side of the plane. Then I went weightless and rotated, floating with my back to the door. When we hit the updraft I slammed into the door backwards, my elbow hit the door handle, and I saw daylight above my head as the door popped open several inches. As quickly as it had opened, it slammed shut knocking me across the plane. I was still holding on to the camera with both hands. It was over in seconds although it went by in slow motion for me and seamed like a minute. We had fallen 200 ft. The Co-Pilot, knowing that I was not strapped in had turned around in time to see me floating and banging the door open. He informed the pilot who told me to buckle up and said, “Let’s go home”.

After the two missions I photographed quite a few other bombed out cities from low altitudes. In contrast to the mile wide area of destruction that I saw in the two atom bomb cities, other cities had irregular shaped spots some cleaned out by blasts, others burned out by firebombs. This was the result of selective targets, docks in one area – factories in another – military facilities in another. Tokyo had been hardest hit with an area of 16 square miles burned out with napalm and magnesium fire bombs, killing 83,000 people in the first of several incendiary bomb raids on the city. Incendiary bombs unlike atomic bombs caused a conflagration, which burned all oxygen out of the air, suffocating all in the area.

The fire bombings had extracted a terrible price from thousands of Japanese civilians and military personal alike. General Curtis LeMay had 80 cities on his “hit list” including those on the atomic bomb list. The latter were off limits until the final decision was made and use of the atomic bomb occurred. If the atomic bombs were not used or if they were duds, LeMay almost certainly would have killed more people with incendiary bombs than were killed with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay had already destroyed 58 Japanese cities by the end of July 1945, killing hundreds of thousands more people than were killed by the atomic bombs. I believe that the use of the atomic bombs broke a stalemate within the (Japanese Supreme Council for the Direction of the War) and ended the war early. As I flew out of Atsugi, headed for the United States on 9 August 1946 I believed that the U.S. possession of atomic bombs would deter any future wars. Little did I know that Klaus Fuchs had passed almost total atom bomb design details to Russia through Julius and Ethel Rosenburg. This coupled with the capture and deportation to Russia of the German A-Bomb team at the end of the war in Europe, enabled Russia to have the A-Bomb by 1949, which was the start of the cold war.