A sailor from Glossop saw for himself the horrors of Hiroshima just months after an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city.
Leading Seaman J Moorhouse of High Street East, who sent pictures of the devastation to the Chronicle, later told our reporter: “It was if some giant’s feet had trodden on the city and crushed everything.”
The Chronicle caught up with the young seaman while he was at home on 17 days leave in the summer of 1945 following service in the Pacific.
In an interview he gave a graphic account of the horrors, saying: “All I can say is thank goodness the Allies invented the deadly weapon first and it was not dropped on people in the British Isles.
“While I was in the Far East I visited Hiroshima and saw what deadly power is contained in this amazing weapon.
Leading Seaman J Moorhouse
“The photograph was taken some months after the bombing, but even then the people had not recovered sufficiently to begin clearing up and rebuilding their homes.
“Roads of a fashion have been cleared by the Australian and British troops and telephone lines installed.
“But the people themselves live in wooden huts or even in holes they have dug in the ground, their possessions are nil.”
The Glossop seaman, who had been in the Royal Navy for three and a half years, continued: “Months after the bombing, delicate instruments on the ship went wrong and no other cause could be found for it, except the atmospheric conditions caused by the bomb.
“Life in Hiroshima is at a complete standstill. No trade is conducted, no trains travel into the city, the only food available is delivered by the troops.
“The Japanese people receive food at communal feeding centres, it consists mainly of fish and rice.”
Leading Seaman Moorhouse who had worked at Turn Lee Paper Mill in Glossop and was hoping to return after being demobbed, said the atomic bomb left a trail of desolation and destruction which was unknown in Germany where the RAF had ‘pounded the targets night after night’.
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