Worse than B-29s

Showing his town to TIME Correspondent Carl Mydans one afternoon last week, Lieut. Colonel James Hyland, commander of the U.S. Military Government in Fukui, remarked, "Look at it. Ninety-seven percent destroyed in one B-29 raid in 1945, and already 60% rebuilt. No shanties in this city either. We're building for permanency." The earthquake that rocked the city three hours later killed 1,600 people, injured 10,000 more. Mydans, who was uninjured, cabled this report:

The U.S. Army dines early in Fukui. At 5:14 p.m. we were sitting in the concrete officers' mess, waiting for dessert and coffee. There wasn't any warning--the floor just pushed up under us, and great chunks of wall and ceiling began to crash about us. We staggered for doors and windows, knocking into each other and falling to the floor. The driveway before the building buckled up before me as I bounced over it, while concrete slabs thudded down from above. We flung ourselves on the compound lawn, but the earth shook so violently that some of us were jerked upright and bounced about like popcorn.

Across the road, the seven-story Daiwa department store began to crumble, swaying crazily. Ripping, cracking and crashing sounds came from it as sections within collapsed. Yellow dust rose over the city, and suddenly a strong, crazy wind blew up, first from one direction, then another. After a moment's silence came the small voices of human beings--shouts and cries which rose into a din throughout the city. At 5:27 a thin grey wisp of smoke crawled up behind the sagging department store. It grew larger. The fire had begun.

Under the Roof. Frantic cries from inside a nearby flattened shop came from two women and two children pinned beneath the wooden roof. Distracted passersby paused for a moment to help pry up the fallen beams. By this time the fire was spreading in all directions, coming toward us fast. The two rescued women, their babies in their arms, crawled out, red-faced and shaking, shouting "Arigato, arigato!" (Thank you, thank you!). Almost immediately the fire jumped across the street and caught the building from which they had just been rescued.

By this time many buildings had collapsed into the streets, and over the flattened city fire crept steadily. People tossed bundles of bedding and clothes out of windows and doors. Men, women & children picked their way through the ruins of houses, keeping their faces turned always toward the fire, moving more quickly when they saw the nearness of its creeping advance and felt its hot wind.

A barefoot girl in a slip, running by with her other clothes in her arms, dropped a pair of panties at my feet. When I handed them to her she was seized with a fit of high laughter. Two little girls in red-flowered kimonos stood by, crying loudly; their father & mother had disappeared.

An old man came by, bent over with the weight of his wife wrapped in a quilt on his back. Asked how she was, the old man whispered "Mo akan" (Too late), but very low, so that the little boy clinging to the woman's dangling hand should not hear.

Into the Moat. The fire finally drove us into the walled, moated compound of the old palace, which now houses government offices. Across the moat an Army gasoline dump went up, shooting gasoline barrels a thousand feet into the air to start new fires wherever they landed. The palace wall, which in its three centuries had withstood American bombs as well as earthquakes, toppled into the moat.

Shortly before midnight I accompanied Colonel Hyland on a mission to clear the road from the city for incoming aid. With the heat of the street scorching the soles of our feet and smoke bringing tears to our eyes, we walked through the bright red city. We passed Japanese firemen trying to pump water from the palace moat, the only remaining source in the whole city. After the B-29s, people had taken refuge in the waters of the moat, hoping to escape the flames; hundreds of bodies had been found there. The people of Fukui say that tonight's quake was worse than the B-29s.

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