The ‘hollow joy’ of freedom, POW survivor recalls bombing of Nagasaki

Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped.  Image by Cpl Lynn P. Walker, Jr. (Marine Corps) - DOD”War and Conflict” image collection (HD-SN-99-02900). Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped.
Image by Cpl Lynn P. Walker, Jr. (Marine Corps) – DOD”War and Conflict” image collection (HD-SN-99-02900). Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

Image by Peter Mallett, Lookout Second World War veteran Rudi Hoenson goes through his photo album as he recalls his prisoner of war experience.

Image by Peter Mallett, Lookout
Second World War veteran Rudi Hoenson goes through his photo album as he recalls his prisoner of war experience.

Each November, when prisoner of war survivor Rudi Hoenson pauses to reflect on the true meaning of Remembrance Day a long ago nightmare comes to the forefront.

“I get so many sad feelings that well up inside of me and my thoughts instantly flash back to Nagasaki and the [Japanese] POW camp,” says the 92-year-old veteran. “I think of all the people who died needlessly right in front of my eyes, and what went on across Europe, and in Nazi concentration camps. It’s unbelievable, unimaginable to think that all of this could happen, but it did.”

The final and most horrific chapter in Hoenson’s war life was as a Japanese POW on Aug. 9, 1945, when a United States B-29 bomber dropped “Fat Man” on Nagasaki.

While it was a traumatic event for him, he says the use of the bomb was necessary and saved “countless untold” lives in the process.

“If it wasn’t for the bomb, I would not be here today,” he says. “All of us POWs would have been killed if the Americans landed on Japanese soil [with ground troops]. Furthermore, the bomb itself saved millions of lives that would have been lost had the war dragged on.”

The young soldier joined the Dutch army after the bombing on Pearl Harbor at age 17. While they valiantly worked to protect the Dutch East Indies from the Japanese in 1942, the island eventually fell into enemy hands. Hoenson was captured and became a POW, first at Singapore’s Changi Prison, and later to Camp Fukuoka 14 in Nagasaki.

For more than three years, Hoenson and his fellow prisoners performed forced labour for the Mitsubishi Shipyard, helping the Japanese build a 45,000 ton aircraft carrier among other ship-building enterprises.

The prisoners were malnourished, and endured squalid living conditions and abuse in Camp 14. Hoenson says he weighed 160 lbs when he was taken prisoner and just 80 lbs when he left Japan.

“The first winter, over 70 prisoners died of pneumonia,” he recalls.

 
His suffering as a POW came to end on a cloudy summer day in 1945.

“At 11:02 we prisoners witnessed the most unbelievable explosion. I was out in the open [at the prison camp] and the hot blast knocked me over. I was not badly burned, but chaps less than six feet away from me pushing a loaded cart were badly burned, their clothing on fire.”

First Hoenson says there was a brilliant flash of light, thunderous shaking, and then the pressure wave that fanned out from ground zero. Of the 80,000 who died from the explosion and the radiation, more than half succumbed less than 24 hours after detonation.

“There was great confusion with the heat and smoke and we had no idea what to do at first,” he says. “We were in the middle of it all. I can still remember the noise of the flames, the gas cylinders exploding, and one big noise when a large gas factory tank blue up. Everything was like kindling and it all started to burn. Through the smoke we saw the great mushroom cloud.”

The camp and much of the surrounding area were reduced to intensely-burning rubble.

Hoenson and a group of surviving prisoners quickly fled the destroyed compound, with injured prisoners in tow, and headed for the higher ground of a nearby hill five kilometres away.

They had no idea that seemingly short journey would take the entire day.

The “unbelievable” unfolded as they attempted to navigate a burning “labyrinth” of devastated streets on the outskirts of Nagasaki.

“It was a scene of death and dying. The worst part was seeing many Japanese women and children [the men were at work in central Nagasaki] with their clothing ripped apart by the blast, some with their faces and bodies cut open. Some bleeding or blinded, and their flesh melting off their faces. There were children alone, their parents lying dead on the ground, and with absolutely no hope of help for some time.”

Hoenson says he wouldn’t be here if the man who pulled the switch from high above in a B-29 named Bock’s Car, Capt Kemmit Heahan,  had hit his intended target of the nearby Nagasaki railway station located just 900 metres away from their camp.

“The death toll would have been much higher,” he says and could have rivalled the estimated 146,000 killed in Hiroshima just three days earlier.

But the cloudy day obscured the bombardier’s target  and he “unknowingly” dropped the bomb on the Urakami railway station, which was 1,450 metres distance from their location.

“If the bomb had been released as planned, I and all of my 198 fellow prisoners would have been turned into charcoal and ashes,” he says.

In the days following their escape from camp, Hoenson and the other surviving POWs were captured by Japanese Police. They were housed in the city jail during the night and assigned to the job of clearing dead bodies from the wreckage, and debris from collapsed buildings.

“For days, we prisoners were pulling dead bodies out to an open field for identification. But on the fourth day, the bodies were starting to decompose in the summer heat.”

Six days after the bomb was dropped Nagasaki, Japan, announced its surrender to the Allies, and two weeks later the war would come to an end.

“The excitement the day we were told the war was over lasted only a short time for me, I was too tired and had to lie down and rest. Freedom did not bring too much joy. I was just too worn out.”

Peter Mallett, Staff Writer

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