PART I
The Bombs
1 The First Atomic Veterans
Like many millions of other Americans, Marine Corporal Lyman Eugene Quigley reacted to news about Hiroshima
and Nagasaki with relief.
A tall, large-framed, handsome man with straight black hair, bushy eyebrows, and a friendly countenance,
Quigley had enlisted in the Marines soon after Pearl Harbor, at the age of twenty. Leaving his job assembling
electric motors in his native Illinois, Quigley went through boot camp and advanced training in California; by spring
1943 he was on a troop carrier in the South Pacific, headed to Australia and New Zealand.
As part of the 2nd Marine Division, during more than two years in the Pacific, he saw combat at Tarawa,
Okinawa, then Tinian and Saipan. Quigley remained in the Mariana Islands, working in a Marines bulldozer crew,
clearing away an air base for B-29s loaded with explosive bombs and—twice—with atomic weapons.
"All we knew was the war was over, and some kind of special bomb had been dropped," Lyman Quigley
recollected a third of a century later. "All I was thinking was, the war was over, I’m coming back. We were so
happy, we were going home. But it didn’t turn out that way. Unfortunately."1 After the long-awaited formal
surrender took place on September 2, Quigley’s orders sent him not home, but toward Nagasaki.
Peace notwithstanding, U.S. wartime censors kept both Hiroshima and Nagasaki off limits to journalists until
mid-September. "The war was ended, as we had reported, but the censorship was not," wrote George Weller, a
Pulitzer prizewinning war correspondent. "What the command wanted covered was the [POW] prison camps of
northern Japan. . . . away from where the war had been decided a month earlier."2
Violating the U.S. Government’s edict that declared all southern Japan forbidden to the press, Weller headed to
the Japanese island of Kyushu; on September 6, 1945, he became the first known civilian Westerner to enter
Nagasaki since its atomic bombardment, arriving four weeks after the nuclear assault. "When I walked out of
Nagasaki’s roofless railroad station, I saw a city frizzled like a baked apple, crusted black at the open core . . ."3
Weller climbed a nearby hill, gaining an overview. "The long inlet of the main harbor looked eerily deserted,
with the floating lamp of a single freighter smoking off the blistered, sagging piers and twisted derricks. We could
see the main Mitsubishi plant, a long fallen Zeppelin of naked, twisted steel, bent like a child’s structural toy crushed
by a passing foot. Its form was still almost intact, though it was almost directly under the bomb. The sturdiness of
the ceilings had taken the blast and blocked the ray. The workers were more fortunate than their families in the onestory
bungalows around the plant. They did most of the dying."4
A U.S. military inspection team was dispatched for the nuclear-ravaged cities, reaching Hiroshima on September
8 and going on to Nagasaki a few days later. "In all the areas examined, ground contamination with radioactive
materials was found to be below the hazardous limits," the U.S. Army’s official history states.5 Within two weeks
after its inspection team began surveying the two Japanese cities, the War Department announced that scientists had
ascertained that the residual radiation in Nagasaki did not merit concern. The situation was unprecedented, however,
and understanding of nuclear-fission particles’ effects was in its infancy. On September 23, U.S. occupying troops
disembarked at Nagasaki harbor—forty-five days after the bombing.
"They came along in Jeeps," Kayano Nagai recounted a few years later. She was four years old as she watched
the occupiers enter her home city. "Daddy told me they were Marines and lots of them were college students. They
were all very nice and they had very good manners, and whenever we said ’Haro’ they gave us chocolate and
chewing gum."6 Much of Nagasaki was in ruins. Kayano’s mother and an estimated eighty thousand other Nagasaki
residents were dead from the atomic bombing; thousands of others were in agony.
"We walked into Nagasaki unprepared, and we were shocked as hell at what was there," Lyman Quigley
remembered many years later. "Really, we were ignorant about what the hell the bomb was. We had no idea what
we were going to see. We weren’t given any instructions whatsoever. We were amazed, shocked—and yet
stupefied." It was a grisly scene. Corpses were still being burned in the open air. "Women’s hair was falling out, the
men all had their heads shaved, and all of them had running sores on their heads, ears, all over."7
At the time, gruesome as the panorama of suffering was, it seemed to involve only other people’s problems.
Quigley and fellow members of Company C, 2nd Pioneer Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, made their way up a steep
hill from the docks; about 150 strong, the Marines of Company C billeted at a partially destroyed concrete
schoolhouse up the hill from the spot over which the atomic bomb had exploded.
Orders from above did not include any unusual precautionary guidelines or provisions. Quigley and his buddies
drank city reservoir water, and worked in the midst of the most heavily damaged area without any protective clothing
or special gear. They were not provided with radiation-dose badges or any other equipment to measure their
exposure to radioactivity.
Quigley was in charge of a Marine bulldozer crew razing what was left of wrecked structures, cleaning up rubble,
clearing out roads, and leveling the ground. For Company C Marines the long days settled into a busy routine amidst
the dusty debris—bulldozing, hauling, standing guard duty in the blast center area by day, sleeping in the makeshift
camp at the schoolhouse by night. Quigley bought some silk kimonos for his sister and some young women friends
back home. But there was little time or incentive for sight-seeing.
Toward the end of autumn many of the Marines were sent out of Nagasaki. On November 4, after forty-three
days of working in the radioactive rubble of Nagasaki, Corporal Quigley received a Good Conduct medal ("We used
to call it a Ruptured Duck," he quipped with a chuckle) and later that month shipped back to the States.
"When I got back, I had burning, itching, running sores on the top of my head and the top of my ears," Quigley
recalled. The sores looked to him like those on Nagasaki’s residents. He called the running sores to the attention of
a doctor during a routine discharge examination in December 1945. "They listed that in my medical records as a
fungus, which is wrong—I know that now." Also: "I had a warm feeling in my lips. I remember that distinctly."8
On December 21, 1945, Lyman Eugene Quigley received an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps. On the
surface his military service had the trappings of a traditional all-American tale. The troubling radioactive underside,
with its ironic and disturbing twists, would not become apparent to him for decades.
records in Quigley’s claim file at the regional Veterans Administration office in Portland, Oregon. .
1. Lyman Quigley, and Bernice and Ron Quigley, interviews, November 1978; in addition, authors obtained hundreds of pages of medical and military service .
2. David Brown and W. Richard Bruner, eds., How I Got That Story (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967), p. 209.
3. Ibid., p. 211.
4. Ibid., p. 217.
5. William S. Augerson, M.D., Director, Health Care Operations, Department of the Army, Office of the Surgeon General, to Harry Shaich, University of
Oregon Health Services Center, February 25, 1975, quoting from Radiology in World War II (Medical Department, U.S. Army, 1965)..
6. Takashi Nagai, We of Nagasaki (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1951), pp. 19-20.
7. Quigley interviews.