James Cameron Is Adapting ‘Ghosts of Hiroshima’: Read an Excerpt

Academy Award winning director James Cameron is adapting Ghosts of Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino to write and direct as what will likely be his first non-Avatar film in decades. Based on years of forensic archaeology combined with interviews of more than 200 survivors and their families, Ghosts of Hiroshima, published on Aug. 5 — the week of the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book is a you-are-there account of ordinary humans who are thrust into extraordinary events, including the men who dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan, and the dozen “double-survivors” who miraculously lived through both.

This excerpt tells the story of a most unusual act of humanity in one of the darkest places on Earth. At Prison Camp 25, just 40 miles north of Nagasaki, 23 year-old POW John Baxter and 125 other “hell ship” survivors only lived to see war’s end due to the lifesaving efforts of a young prison guard named Hyato, whose actions prevented them from being starved and worked to death.

John Baxter understood that he should not be alive. Not after the jungle prison camps. Not after the “hell ship” Ussuri Maru’s narrow escape through torpedo attacks that left much of the convoy on the bed of the sea. And not through the typhoon that pulled away huge deck structures along the way to the port city of Nagasaki. 

By the morning of August 9, 1945, Baxter understood that he owed his continued survival to a soldier named Hyato. He knew that Hyato, like the rest of the Japanese, had grown up under indoctrination by warlords who perverted the ancient Samurai codes. Except for this one man, the evidence of the warlords and Japan going crazy had been horribly apparent. 

Perhaps a tad crazier than the rest, Hyato showed uncommon humanity toward Baxter and the other POWs under his charge, when their treatment by his brethren was nothing but regimented cruelty. The young man risked beatings that would end in summary execution for sneaking in extra food to prisoners who were supposed to be the empire’s work-and-starve-to-death slaves. Food was sometimes acquired, prepared, and packaged by Hyato’s wife, who risked the same lethal retaliation if caught.

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Camp 25 was located above a mostly depleted coal seam, 1,400 feet deep. The odds of survival here were tenuous on the best of days. Supplies to prop up the ceilings of the tunnels were restricted, so staying alive required such on-the-fly innovations as creating support pillars out of waste rock. The ceilings often collapsed anyway. Twenty Allied slaves had died in this manner. Some of the Japanese overseers died, too.

Prison life got even worse after the strange, futuristic-appearing B-29s began dominating the sky. A fatal curiosity had driven two British officers to attempt building a radio receiver. When caught, they were sentenced to dragging, facedown over gravel, until they implicated any prisoners who had aided in the scavenging of parts. They died without confessing, taking the names of their friends with them to their shallow graves.

“Everyone talks under torture.” This widely known saying was almost always true. But not in Camp 25, not this time. 

Even before he arrived at Fukuoka’s Prison Camp 25, fellow hell ship passenger Alistair Urquhart, known as “the stubborn Scotsman,” had survived the impossible. In Thailand, a Japanese “scientist” known as Dr. Death delighted in looking for signs that a man’s eyes continued to search the world in fright after a beheading, if blood was forcefully bottled up around the brain for a minute or two. In his other moments of spare time, he would stand on cliffs while the prisoners worked, entertaining himself by tossing rocks and boulders down on them, laughing when he scored a hit. 

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Each morning, Alistair had performed an act of meditative hypnosis on himself. “To face that day alone,” he would write later. “Not the next day. Just that day. The next morning was the same. I was only thinking of myself and how I could avoid dying like those around me.” 

At Camp 25, the Scot’s mantra became “I’ve seen worse.” Dr. Death and others with nicknames like “the Mad Mongrel” had not made the hell ship voyage (which Alistair took to be his final saving grace). Camp 25’s coal mine was so depleted as to have been abandoned, except for this ants’-nest existence to be survived by slave laborers. Alistair’s friend Dr. Matheson had kept the sick and injured alive (in a prison with no medicines) by distilling remedies from various semi-poisonous weeds. Recently, a decision from the Imperial Palace stipulated that all POWs were to be executed if the Allies ever landed on Japan’s shores. 

The predawn hours of August 9 were unusually quiet. Even the insect night shift was silent around the camp and also in the nearby hills, as if nature were holding its breath. 

Nearly forty miles south along the silent hills lay the city of Nagasaki. 

John Baxter had been assigned to Hyato after an overseer/ engineer observed his mechanical and electrical skills in the mines. Baxter was transferred to the camp’s repair shop where he had remained since the beginning of the year, all the way up through the moment the crew of Bockscar—the B-29 carrying the “Fat Man” atomic bomb—made final preparations for creation of a 27 kiloton air-burst.

The permanence of this ultimately lifesaving transfer owed much to the improper maintenance of mining equipment and the withholding of necessary lubricating grease by the Japanese themselves. All the easier, Baxter realized, for us to camouflage sabotaging of the equipment—to further limit coal supplies for the enemy.

Baxter prided himself in “pulling the wool over Hyato’s eyes,” rigging equipment to self-destruct even as the guard was smuggling food to the men. Only much later would Baxter learn, “He had an idea we were doing this, but he kept quiet.” Baxter sometimes regretted that if the sabotage were discovered, Hyato would have been in almost as much trouble as the camp’s POWs. But Baxter’s allegiance had to be to his fellow prisoners still down in the mine. Surviving on edge-of-starvation rations, the broken equipment bought them necessary hours of life-saving rest.

August 9, had begun hot and steamy, as usual. The camp commandant ordered prisoners to stand atop mine tillings absent their water rations, as a punishment, “because of Hiroshima.” (Whatever that was supposed to mean, the commandant had left unsaid.)

Overhead, twin glints of silver were traveling nearly wing-to-wing and scratching a vapor trail across the heavens. American planes. The new kind. The same kind that had raised a curiosity strong enough already to have cost two POWs their lives. B-29s: Perplexing, and on this day frightful. Prison guards dived into shelter pits and snapped down the covers so swiftly that it looked as though the entire company were crawling into holes and trying to pull the holes in behind themselves.

They know something, Baxter thought. He told a friend, “It can’t be long now.”

Then an all-encompassing brightness filled the sky. The Hiroshima weapon three days earlier had flash-desiccated leaves on trees out to a distance of almost ten miles — the Nagasaki device, up to fifty miles. 

The sudden explosive change of air pressure and the heating of the air itself cleared every cloud out of the sky, mystifying Baxter and everyone else who witnessed the disappearance. Even at a distance of nearly forty miles, the rising fireball was “an awe-inspiring sight.” The glowing cloud rose almost gracefully, like a time-lapse film of a flower blooming. Many seconds later, a great shock wave pulsed through the ground. The airburst arrived almost a minute and a half after the tremor. 

Most of Camp 25 happened to be spread along the bottom of a ravine. Though the blast was intensely loud, the majority of its force shot harmlessly over Baxter’s head, and the nearest hill shaded him from the heat rays until the fireball was at least seven miles high and its energy was all but fractionally spent. Yet Baxter could feel its heat against his face. At this same prison camp, where Baxter and a few fellow slaves were safely cocooned between hills, “others of our party,” he recorded, “had been emerging from the mine, covered in black coal dust.”

Most of the camp was shadowed in the ravine. Most, but not all. The emerging miners, exposed directly to the flash during its first split second, were covered in flash-absorbing black. “The coal dust ignited against their skin,” Baxter would record. “Others had the presence of mind (within that first critical half second) to push these unfortunates into nearby puddles, facedown—which ensured that they were not severely burned.”

The Scotsman Alistair would always remember something like a great lightning strike in the south, and “a sudden gust of very hot air” that knocked him sideways. And when the prisoners asked one another what they believed had just happened, the Scotsman answered, “Something important is happening in Nagasaki.”

By August 20 — after a palace revolt that had cut the emperor off from the world, after a 2,500 strong firebombing raid that swept over Japan unchallenged on August 14, after the emperor’s warlords freed him and ended their lives by ritual suicide, after the emperor’s August 15 surrender broadcast — B-29s began flying out from the islands of Tinian and Okinawa with food and medical supplies instead of bombs.

Baxter later recorded for his family, “We awoke to an unfamiliar silence from the officers’ guardroom and discovered that the entire garrison had departed overnight — rather hurriedly, leaving all of their rifles and equipment.” 

Hyato remained at his post. The commandant had also stayed behind, in his office. He emerged to read an announcement that the war had ended, then turned himself over to his prisoners, as their POW. Baxter stepped forward with his repair team and offered that they would assume responsibility for his safety until Allied troops arrived — a sentiment that might never have prevailed if not for the humanity of the commandant’s guard, Hyato.

Two days after that, a Red Cross team arrived with a two-way radio, then opened up direct contact with Okinawa. From the island’s command headquarters, Baxter and the other ex-POWs were instructed that they were now the front line of an army occupation force until General MacArthur arrived to organize a new administration for Japan. 

“We have an urgent need for food, medical supplies—even clothing,” the camp’s Dutch physician radioed out. MacArthur himself called back, instructing them to mark drop zones for B-29 supply runs and assuring them that the drops would commence within hours. Of just over 250 POWs still alive at the Camp 25 mine, only seventy were strong enough to help with the recovery of supply crates as they parachuted in.

By August 23, the B-29s had delivered an overenthusiastic over-supply. Meanwhile, the POWs learned, for the first time, that nearly three thousand Chinese slaves needed help at a second camp nearby. In trucks that were now working perfectly, Baxter set off with a convoy of supplies. The Chinese POWs were “a ragged multitude of scarecrows who cowered away from us as we dismounted our trucks . . . having survived cruelty and forced starvation that made our own experience pale [by comparison].”

That night, after the Dutch physician determined that many of the Chinese POWs were too far gone to survive, a desperate Japanese soldier who spoke some small amount of English approached Baxter and begged — “all but demanded, as if still a prison guard” — that Baxter assist in writing a job recommendation to work for General MacArthur’s approaching forces. Baxter and two of his friends enthusiastically completed the forms, signing their recommendations as “Donald Duck,” “Hey, Moe!” and “King George VI.” Baxter added a final instruction at the bottom: “To whom it may concern. Please kick this man’s ass as far as Kingdom Come, and back again.”

Hyato appreciated the sentiment.

During the next two days, B-29s continued to drop supplies. Weapons also arrived, along with four medics. The repair shop team learned from Hyato that there were hospitals nearby with many malnourished children, and among them civilians injured during firebombings of the towns. “It was the Christian thing to do,” Baxter decided, “to return them an empathy rarely felt for the POWs.” They set out for the hospitals in trucks, offering Camp 25’s oversupply of food and medicine, with Hyato assisting as a fluent translator.

During one of the aid excursions, Hyato invited some of Baxter’s team to his home in a nearby village—“for a meal and green tea with his wife,” Baxter would tell The Japan Times in 2010, after Hyato’s death at age eighty-nine. “He was twenty-three years old when I first encountered him.” Baxter remained perplexed about an enemy who “never had a hard word for us — and who fed us, even as we sabotaged some of his machinery!”

Only after he visited the village and Hyato’s house did Baxter finally realize how great a burden the extra food rations they supplied to the POWs must have placed on the prison guard’s family members.

“I believe they were moved to their actions by their faith. They were Buddhists, but Buddhists had to hide their faith during the war.”

And that little meal at the house really did turn into the beginning of a most unusual friendship between a POW and the guard who saved him.

Tamie Ekashira was a resident near Camp 25 on the day Nagasaki exploded. She traveled on foot toward the mystery in the south. In the Urakami hills, about the time Baxter and Hyato reached the Chinese prisoners, Tamie arrived at a blast-flattened forest and began forging a path through. Descending from the forest into the center of a new desert, its bricks swept by sheets of shifting sand, she came upon telephone poles, blackened but still pointing straight up into the heavens, as if somehow protected from the blast. Nearby, an entire school had gone away, leaving behind only traces of its foundations. And a streetcar stood eerily intact. Here, people must have been instantly vaporized all the way down to their bones. Particles of sand-mist — rising into the air at more than fifteen times the boiling point of water — would have cooled the moment they encountered the comparatively cold streamers of vaporizing blood, so that a trillion microbeads of molten glass and the air that enclosed them spontaneously imploded against, and solidified around, the bones and tendons of the passengers. In this manner, if a man in the trolley happened to be speaking, his skeleton was flash-fossilized in mid-word— “the dead-alive effect.” 

Tamie beheld a skeleton woman bearing a skeleton child on her shoulder. The woman of bone and black glass was still holding onto a glass-veneered streetcar strap. The skeletonized driver’s hands were still clasping the wheel. He and the passengers all appeared to have been killed before they could even flinch.

At night, from high in the hills, one could actually see the danger to which Tamie had exposed herself by venturing so deep into the desert, so soon. A faint bluish glow emanated from the central ruins, outshining some of the stars. The worst of the radioactive isotopes were already fading from existence; but the night glow would last for several weeks more, and people would continue to die in ways that people never imagined.

Even Einstein and Szilard, Oppenheimer and Alvarez did not understand the phenomena that surrounded Tamie Ekashira, sickened her emotionally, and began to settle into her lungs and bone marrow, sickening her further. She spared herself from lethal dosing by hurrying home toward Hyato’s neighborhood.

As the clock touched midnight on September 2, a typhoon swept through the area, washing much of the Nagasaki ash layer out to sea, along with Ground Zero’s nightglow. Days later, the former POWs began an expedition to Nagasaki, where ships were arriving to bring them home. 

As for Tamie, so for Baxter. The sights that confronted him were difficult to believe: “The midair burst had created an effect that I could only compare to a giant scythe. Almost everything seemed to have been cut off about three feet from the ground — and everything still standing above that level had been scorched as if by a giant blowtorch.”

Reinforced concrete buildings and chimneys had retained some of their original shape, but the steelwork of the factories that surrounded them resembled crushed birdcages. The iron girders of a water tower were reeds bending in the wind. At the river’s edge, a quarter-mile-long Mitsubishi factory was a mountainous tangle of steel. In the river beyond, sunken ships and unrecognizable debris spread across the entire water surface.

Baxter learned that on the morning of August 9, several prisoners who lived through the hell ships had been sent “to dig shelters and Ohka launch [tunnels] in the hills . . . A ship carrying two hundred [new] POWs was crossing the bay, toward the excavations, when the ship burst into flames under the light of the bomb and could afterward be seen from the shore, slowly sinking. There were no survivors.”

At dusk, the Camp 25 crew had crossed the ruins and reached a harbor in the south, where the aircraft carrier Cape Gloucester was in port. John Baxter and Alistair Urquhart climbed down from their trucks. Since his first year in captivity at age twenty-one, the Scotsman had been reduced from 135 to 82 pounds. During the journey across the black desert, apart from the occasional civilians picking their way among broken foundations, there was little sign of life. No birdsong. No cicada buzz. “Everywhere, an eerie silence.”

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Only as they approached the Cape Gloucester was the unbearable silence of the streets broken. Someone had hooked up a phonograph to concert-quality loudspeakers. They had been invented in a hurry only months earlier, in a partly successful attempt to convince civilians at Saipan and Okinawa, in clear, amplified, Japanese, that rumors of American cannibals were lies from the warlords, and to “please, please stop killing yourselves and your children . . . No one is here to hurt you. We will help you.”

Now, from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, those same amplifiers and speakers — equipment directly ancestral to hard-rock concerts from Tokyo to Shea and into the next century — sent history’s first electronically amplified music across the atomic wasteland. For Baxter and the stubborn Scot, this marked, at last, the reality of war’s end. The end was announced with Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.”