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From the air, Wilma Schulz remembers that Hiroshima looked clean.
The Japanese city was like a front porch, she thought, and a Nebraska housewife had attacked it with a broom and swept the porch spotless.
Once on the ground, Ruth Inman remembers that Hiroshima looked gone.
The trees were charred and twisted. The blast had opened up huge cracks in the road, cracks wide enough to swallow an Army jeep.
And the buildings — the office buildings and houses that contained a bustling, 350,000-person Japanese city — they were rubble, piles of brick and concrete and wood.
They were dust.
“That's been 60-some years, and my memory isn't good about most things,” Inman said. “But I was amazed and horrified by that destruction. I can still remember that.”
Schulz, of Blue Hill, Neb., and Inman, originally from Alma, Neb., are both 88-year-olds who have lived long, quiet lives working and raising children and enjoying grandchildren.
But the two friends, who served as Army nurses during World War II, have tucked a stunning memory into the war scrapbooks they still keep.
They were among the first Americans to see Hiroshima after President Harry Truman ordered the dropping of the first atomic bomb ever detonated during war.
Today is the 65th anniversary of that bombing. As many as 200,000 residents — more than half the population of Hiroshima — died either in the blast and its aftermath or later from radiation sickness.
A second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki three days later, resulted in the deaths of approximately 140,000 and led the Japanese to surrender.
Sixty-five years later, the two Nebraska nurses can still remember the brutal war's end and the strange trip that followed.
Stationed at an Army hospital in the Philippines, they were put on a plane, flown to a makeshift military aid station in Japan and eventually allowed to tour nearby Hiroshima.
“Two bombs, and it was over,” Schulz said. “We never dreamed it could end the war like it did. And then, we were there.”
Schulz and Inman both trained at Hastings' Mary Lanning Hospital and joined the Army Nurse Corps, joining the nearly 60,000 female nurses who staffed military hospitals in the European and Pacific Theaters as the war raged.
The two Nebraskans were lucky, Schulz thinks — they reached the Philippines in the spring of 1945, after most of the once-brutal battles in and around Manila had ended.
Schulz worked in a tent, mostly treating GIs with dysentery, she said.
Inman served as the head nurse in an operating room, scheduling operations and supervising nurses inside a building with corrugated metal walls.
After the war ended in August 1945, she cared for dozens of released American prisoners of war, pumping them full of fluids and nutrients to help the emaciated GIs gain weight.
The routine of eight-hour nursing shifts and free time ended abruptly in November 1945, when the Army shut down the hospital. Half of the nurses were transferred to other hospitals in the Philippines.
The others, including Schulz and Inman, were ushered onto a transport plane bound for Japan.
They got their first glimpse of Hiroshima when the plane circled and then landed on an airstrip on the city's outskirts. They unloaded their luggage, stood on the airstrip — and were quickly herded back onto the airplane by a military policeman, who screamed at the pilot, “What are you doing here? You aren't supposed to be here!”
The nurses were then taken to a staging area on an island off Japan and then to a makeshift military clinic east of Hiroshima.
Truth be told, there was little work, Schulz and Inman said. The military hospital served only Americans, and the only injuries came when an appendix burst or a soldier wrecked an Army jeep.
Schulz spent her free time trading Army-issued cartons of cigarettes and alcohol — she didn't smoke or drink — for Japanese bowls, tablecloths and trinkets.
Inman, who now lives in the Dallas suburb of Carrollton, Texas, remembers the day a young Japanese girl inched closer and closer to her, finally close enough to startle Inman by stroking her hair. The girl had never seen blond hair before.
But the memory burned into both nurses' brains is the day later in 1945 when they climbed onto military trucks and headed west to see Hiroshima.
No one, not even the medical providers, thought for a second about the aftereffects of radiation, Schulz said.
Which is how a pack of nurses found themselves walking around the blast site of the world's first wartime atomic bomb.
Schulz and Inman both said the trip to Hiroshima didn't change their bedrock belief that the bombs needed to be dropped. Otherwise, they said, they would have had to care for thousands of injured American servicemen sent to fight during what would have been a horrific invasion of Japan.
But to see what the first bomb wrought is to understand devastation, they said.
Schulz remembers picking up a piece of a dish and turning it in her hands. She couldn't find anything that wasn't broken.
Inman remembers how an old Japanese man on a bicycle stopped next to her. In broken English, waving his arms, he tried to explain what he had seen. People on fire. Women and children dying.
Everything, everyone, destroyed.
“You just felt …,” Inman said, her voice trailing off. “I guess I'm just thankful that it ended the way it did, instead of the other way around.”
Contact the writer:
444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
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