I have two surviving uncles from my father’s side. At the time of atomic bomb explosions, 細叔 was in a city 20-minute away from Hiroshima, and 三叔 was about 700 meters away from the Ground Zero at Nagasaki.

Both of them studied at Nagasaki University Medical School which was a popular school for Taiwanese students because of warm climate and proximity to home. At the time, 三叔 was already a medical resident at the university hospital, and 細叔 was still in his junior year. (Note: MD program normally took only 4 years to complete in that era). It was in the summer time, and 細叔 got away from Nagasaki only because he worked as a hospital volunteer in the town called 尾道, which is 20 minutes away from Hiroshima. This volunteer job later proved to be a life-saver for him. It’s highly unlikely that he could have survived had he stayed in Nagasaki that summer. In the conversation, 細叔 said that at the moment of Hiroshima explosion, they noticed unusual brightness but never realized the extent of damage until the news arrived. He joined the hospital rescue team and rushed to Hiroshima the next day. Like he described, there wasn’t much to be rescued from when they arrived at the city center. Nonetheless, he stayed to help until another bomb was dropped a few days later at Nagasaki. Having witnessed the power of the Hiroshima bomb, he trembled with fear for his brother’s life. He rushed back to 尾道 and took a train from there to Nagasaki looking for his brother. It took him long time to arrive at Nagasaki outskirts where the train couldn’t go any farther because of distorted railroad track. He managed to locate the university hospital in the rubbles but his brother was nowhere in sight. Later, he found an old neighbor who told him that his brother had gone to 尾道 to look for him. The two brothers had apparently missed each other, but at least his brother was alive!! Unfortunately, there were terrible casualties from both families. All of their family members, including 三叔’s wife and daughter, were killed. The neighbor also described how they set up the wood fire to cremate the corpses of the deceased family members. What a horrific scene! Frankly, I couldn’t understand how they could cremate a body using just wood fire alone, but 細叔 said he never asked. Presumably, bones even cremated incompletely could be crushed into semi-ashes by hands and put in the ash urn. The so-called ash urn was just a ceramic container normally used for marinated cucumber (醬瓜).

After the war, 三叔 returned to Taiwan. My brother said he still vividly remembered the scenes of 三叔’s returning home with the urn, kneeling on the floor of our ancestors hall (祖堂), and crying with exhausted voice and vanishing tears. What a tragic ending to the road of his study abroad! At the time of the bombings, my father had been drafted to serve as a Japanese army doctor for about a year. Nobody in the family knew where he was except that he stationed at 南方.* He later said that he learned of the Nagasaki bombing from Japanese military radio news and feared that his two brothers were doomed. He didn’t know of their survival until he returned home nine months after the war ended. In the first several of the 9 months, my poor mother lived with anxiety and terror. Whenever there was a news of soldiers returning from 南方, she rushed to find out if anyone ever saw my father anywhere. Every time she went with hope and returned with disappointment. She covered most of the areas in southern Taiwan. After many dashed hopes, she couldn’t sustain the pressure anymore. Despair began to set in and she became ill on bed until one evening, without any warning and from nowhere, returned my father safely! The allied navy (more precisely, the Dutch Navy) took him home from an Indonesian island by the name of Halmahera where his battalion stationed. His life was spared mainly because of General Macarthur’s Island-Hopping strategy.

三叔 was an odd ball when he was young, a rebel without a cause. Defying all conventional wisdoms, he quit high school 南一中, citing Thomas Edison’s example that formal education wasn’t necessary. He later became a truck driver riding on the dangerous Su-Hua Road (蘇花公路). After a while, he changed his mind again and joined the Japanese aviation school to become a surveillance pilot. I was once told by one extended family member that 三叔 would have had the intensity and the capacity to carry out a kamikaze mission had he been given a chance. He calmed down only after my grandfather got him married. Amazingly, he later managed to enter Nagasaki University Medical School through self study and “equal academic status”(同等學歷). He was a sharp and rebellious young man! Among my extended family, he is the only one who can still read German. He took only one German course at his university and did it mostly through self study later.

Since the war ended, 三叔 has been relatively silent about the whole thing and probably never mentioned this horrific scene of corpse cremation. Now I got this first-hand information from 細叔 during this hospital visit. In the conversation that day, 細叔 attributed 三叔’s survival to two factors. One was that he was wearing a doctor’s white robe which might have reflected and reduced the deadly radiation. This is not pure speculation. There have been reports that the corpse skins of some victims were imprinted with their clothing pattern. And the second factor was that he was away from a window and luckily shielded by a big concrete pole. Ironically, most of those higher ranking doctors with windows in their offices died. He passed out but later awakened from the rubbles dotted with victims’ bodies. His wife and daughter died from radiation overdose several days after. In the conversation, 細叔 also said that 三叔 told him that the week before that dreadful day, the B29 air bombings schedule had been routinely, starting around 9am and lasted for about 10 minutes every day. After the bombing, people came out and ran their errands. Same routine repeated that day. But after the air bombing squad left, another B29 arrived with the A bomb. At the time of explosion, his wife, along with their daughter, was washing his clothing on the riverbank of a creek.

After the war, both uncles got married and have fathered normal children without any side effect. But I believe this horrific scene of cremation had left an un-healable scar in 三叔’s heart. I remember, back in 1965, when I first told him that I was accepted by Chiao-Tung University to study electronic engineering, his response was an uninspiring and head-shaking low-tone voice: “Why do you want to study something to kill people?” I was puzzled then but I can understand now. It took so much to convert a would-be kamikaze pilot to an extreme humanitarian.

Since the hospital visit, that horrific image has stayed in my head for a long time, an image of a grieving husband/father burning the corpses of his beloved wife/child under a mushroom cloud.

‧ footnote: In that era, Japanese called Southeast Asia 南方。

陳德玉，交通大學1969年畢業，現任臺大電機系教授。