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Part 3 Rescue and Medical Relief

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The units listed below were dispatched from military and naval forces between the day of the atomic bombing (August 9) and the end of the war on August 15. These units engaged in aid operations such as rescuing the injured, disposing of the dead, clearing roads, and restoring facilities in cooperation with the private sector and governments.

Nagasaki Fortress Headquarters (which had become the 122nd Independent Combined Brigade Headquarters in May 1945) is referred to below as “NFH.”
Army Engineering Corps: 150 members (NFH Unit 28288)
Army Signal Corps: one company (NFH Unit 28287)
Army Infantry: two battalions (NFH Units 28282 and 28286)
(Returned home temporarily on August 13)
Army High-Angle Gun Unit: 20
Coast Defense Ship Crew Unit: 100
The 21st Naval Aeronautical Arsenal Workers Unit: 150
Kawatana Naval Dockyard Workers Unit: 250
Other related units:
　The 40th Regiment of Ship Engineers (the 8th Unit, Western Force) stationed at Shimabara Women’s High School.
　The 40th Regiment of Ship Engineers (the 19825th Akatsuki Unit) stationed at Kōka Women’s High School.

It is said that several men were dispatched to Nagasaki by truck each day to engage in rescue and material-handling operations in the devastated area.
　The student unit of Saga High School (abbreviated as SHS) was incorporated as the only mobilized student aid unit into the above-mentioned main aid units of military and naval forces.
　The SHS Aid Unit, comprised of 141 of the 250 members of the Kawatana Naval Dockyard Workers Unit, consisted of first-year students who had just been mobilized to work at the Kawatana Naval Dockyard about two weeks before the atomic bombing (the latter part of July). Opinions were divided about dispatching the first-year students to Nagasaki, the teachers in charge and the dockyard disagreeing, but the student unit was mobilized under the command of the military to help with the situation at the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Arms Factory. The SHS Aid Unit joined the naval workers unit as a special engineering unit and received a supply of two blankets and a conscripted soldier’s bamboo canteen per person. In the evening of the day after the atomic bombing (August 10), the student unit went separately on board two Daihatsu landing boats from Kawatana and landed at Togitsu after crossing Ōmura Bay.
　Marching from Togitsu in the darkness, the unit came across a truck fully loaded with injured persons. While encouraging all the wounded evacuees walking past them, the unit continued on into the devastated area, arriving at Sumiyoshi Tunnel Factory at around 11:00 p.m. and taking a rest there. The rising sun revealed many corpses scattered all around. It is said that many of the unit members could not eat even the two pieces of rationed hardtack for breakfast.
　That morning, the SHS Aid Unit members from Nagasaki were given permission to leave for one hour. One of the members, Morimitsu Masayuki (currently a medical practitioner) immediately returned to his family home in Ofunagura-machi but found it completely burned, and he could not confirm the safety of his parents and brothers. He later described the situation as follows:

In the area from Akasako, where Sumiyoshi Tunnel Factory was located, to Ōhashi, we could tell whether the corpses we saw were adults or children, men or women. But in the hypocenter area such as Matsuyama-machi and Hamaguchi-machi, the dead were so blackened and shrunken that we could not distinguish one from another. Only when we reached Urakami Railroad Station and the neighborhoods to the south were we able once again to guess the age and gender of corpses.

At Mitsubishi Arms Ōhashi Factory, the SHS Aid Unit split into groups of four and began to pick up bodies using stretchers. When leaving Kawatana, many members had assumed that aid operations were limited to helping restore the factory facilities, but it was not such an easy situation and they had to do hard work from the beginning. The corpses were brought to the back of Ōhashi Factory one after another.
　From August 12, the unit members engaged in disposing of the dead. The students, who the day before had been asked by two grieving parents to cremate their son’s body (found in the ditch beside Ōhashi Factory) and who had turned down the request, saying that they were not in charge of cremation, had to cremate the body the next day. Corpses they had picked up in the factory were already giving off a bad smell. Plugging their nostrils with paper and covering their noses with towels, the students put the corpses on sheets of lumber and stacked them in such a way as to create three layers, then cremated the bodies. Before cremation, if the corpses were still clothed, the students wrote down the names from the nametags sewn on the cloth. If the corpses were naked, they were cremated with no identification. Approximately 20 bodies were cremated at a time and the ashes placed in rough wooden boxes. During cremation, there were two or three instances where members did not evacuate until they heard the roar of enemy planes overhead, because the siren did not sound. Disposal of the dead continued until August 13, the next day.
　After three days, the SHS Aid Unit completed its aid operations for the time being and returned to Kawatana on a freight car from Michino’o Railroad Station in the evening of August 13. Among the aid unit members there were several students who had taken a leave of absence from school, due to radiation sickness. The SHS Aid Unit members, like many other people participating in the aid units, suffered radiation sickness and in some cases died.

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