Carol Hayes - Reading Embraced by Australia: Hiroshima Module 1

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If I had to say what experience scarred me most deeply during WWII, I would have to say the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb.

I was born in 1925 (Taisho 14) in Hiroshima City in Hiroshima Prefecture. After graduating from the girls high school I attended, I started working at Shinko Jinken Co. Ltd. (todays Mitsubishi Rayon Co. Ltd.). In May 1944, when the war situation was becoming increasingly bad for Japan, our section head took our whole department to Manchuria to establish the Manchuria Soybean Chemical Industrial Co. Ltd. (Mansh Daizu Kagaku Kgy) to supplement the shortages in raw materials for textile manufacture, and so I moved to Andong city (now Dandong) in Manchuria.

In July 1945, after one year passed without incident, I received an unexpected telegram from Japan. Mother sick. Return home immediately.

Shocked, I took leave from work and returned to Japan straight away. Now you can travel between China and Japan on a single flight, but then you had to travel by boat, and worse because of the war it took me five days to get back. When I made it home, my mother was better than I expected. She wasnt seriously ill, just run down because shed been made to work too hard as part of the home front war effort. Added to this was that she really wanted to see me, her daughter hence the telegram. I was relieved, but I decided to stay at home for a while.

194586

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Then came August 6. My younger sister had been suffering from stomachache since the night of August 4 and although she was well enough to sit up in bed, Id told her to take another day off. We were chatting, while my elder sister was having a late breakfast. Earlier that morning shed gone to visit Mr. H, who had a farm on the outskirts of town. Shed hoped to exchange a small quantity of sugar, so precious at the time, for some rice, but no one was home and so shed come back earlier than expected. Our younger brother had just come home from his night shift at the munitions factory and for some reason, that particular morning, instead of going straight to his mosquito-netted bed, was sitting on the windowsill playing the guitar. Mother had gone to an inn on Kurahashi Island in the Inland Sea to convalesce. Father was just about to leave the house.

The air-raid siren sounded and the radio broadcast its warning, Three B29s are approaching Hiroshima airspace! My father muttered, Huh? Only three? Soon after that we heard a sharp metallic whine and the roar of the B29s passing overhead. Father had been waiting to go outside, and taking the All Clear siren as his sign, he left the house. He was a fire fighter in the local civil defence unit and so was already wearing his firefighters uniform.