Nagasaki The last witnesses

Japanese studies scholar Sheftall turns to the bombing of Nagasaki in this harrowing follow-up to Hiroshima. In his opening passages, Sheftall briefly surveys Nagasaki's history, particularly the Mitsubishi Corporation's 1920s transformation of the city into an industrial center, and its unique landscape--the city occupied two valleys amidst three mountain peaks--all of which contributed to the day's fateful events. After several last-minute reroutes due to poor visibility, the bomb was dropped over the less populated of the city's valleys, which contained two Mitsubishi plants, inadvertently allowing a mountain to shield many downtown residents from the blast. The bulk of the text presents the recollections of five now-elderly survivors; four were teenagers at the time, but all had been put to work for the war effort. One 16-year-old, home after working an overnight factory shift, stood by his window shirtless to cool off; he recalls feeling "like someone had just pressed a laundry steam iron onto his bare back" before "a tremendous gust" sent him "tumbling through the air." A 13-year-old employed digging an air raid shelter recalls that "a blast of hot wind hit her like a giant slap... flinging her into the far wall of the ditch." The horrors were compounded in the aftermath as residents feared further attacks and inadvertently exposed themselves to radiation. Sheftall's meticulous, novelistic recreations are deeply immersive. It's an invaluable contribution to 20th-century history. (Aug.)

Witnesses to horrific history tell their stories. There are more than 100,000 still-living hibakusha--survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sheftall's book recounts the survivor memories of Aug. 9, 1945, when the world's first plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, three days after the world's first atomic weapon was dropped on Hiroshima. The decision to drop a second bomb so soon after the first was to bluff the Japanese into believing that there were many more such weapons in the American arsenal, the author says, and that they would continue to fall until Japan surrendered unconditionally. The Japanese, until that point, had seemed "prepared to die en masse in a final decisive battle…rather than dishonor [the country] with surrender." Both sides were in a "strategic standoff in which bluff and resolve were indistinguishable." American forces ran a series of conventional bombings across Japan designed to break the Japanese resolve. The biggest of those hit Tokyo in March 1945, when 3,000 airmen dropped seven tons of bombs in an unprecedented nighttime low-altitude raid that destroyed 41 square kilometers of the city, killed 100,000, and left one million people homeless. Japanese leaders still did not surrender, setting the course of the war toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sheftall alternates stories of U.S. bombing preparations with vivid stories from Japanese survivors, notably Masako and Michiko, female workers in Mitsubishi ordnance plants. The book details the post-bombing meetings of the Japanese Supreme War Council that led to Japan's surrender on Aug. 15. Sheftall writes of one teenager's reaction to the war's conclusion: "Sueko was overcome with a powerful mixture of regret and sadness over the defeat. She also felt--very much to her shame--relief that she was going to survive. As she began to bawl, her mother stroked her back, softly saying, 'The war is over….Thank goodness.'" A definitive account of a watershed moment in history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.