ATOM BOMB

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 9, Issue 37, 8 January 1946, Page 7

ATOM BOMB

DEVASTATING EFFECT

N.Z. MEN’S EXPERIENCE

Two New Zealanders who returned in the destroyer Wizard were within close range of the atomic bomb when it fell on Nagasaki an/cl described its devastating effects to a press, representative in Welling.' ton. They were Signalmen I. Shipman

Timaru, and Stoker G. Paterson Wellington. Both were in British ships sunk

in .1012 and were in a prison camp six miles away when the atomic bomb hit Nagasaki. “After the. first bomb hit Hiroshima the Japanese got into an awful panic ” Signalman Shipman said. “When the plane carrying the second bomb came over Nagasaki we thought little of it 5 having no

idea what it was about to drop. It was just before 11 o’clock on a linc } clear morning. We. saw four parachutes come down and thought they were incendiary bombs. Then there was a terrific flash like the Hash of a photographer’s lamp magnified a million times. Two seconds later

there was a blast that 1 couldn’t even describe. It brought a terrific heat—about 200 degrees Fahrenheit I should say—and a hundred mile-an-hour gale. “When we left in September it was still impossible for anyone to go inJ.o an area about a mile or a mile and a Half square where the bomb struck. Anyone who did so dropped dead abut two days, lateif. There, was just an enormous, pall of smoke over what had been Nagasaki. “I was knocked flat by the blast and by the time 1 recovered it was all over. We suffered so much from shock that we could not speak but just wandered round looking at one another.

“Two days later they told us it was some new type of bomb and an American dentiist and ail English doctor among the prisoners put their heads, together and decided tHat the splitting of the atom must have beer, tHo secret of it.”