Geoffrey Sherring

The following are excerpts from George Duffy and Geoffrey Sherring's account of experience of Atom Bomb at Fukuoka #14 Nagasaki POW Camp for Mitsubishi Iron Foundry linked from Center for Research Allied POWS Under the Japanese - Roger Mansell]

[Geoffrey Sherring became a riveter in the Mitsubishi shipyard at Nagasaki... On August 9, 1945 he was less than two kilometers (about a mile) from the explosion's epicenter.

What happened in Nagasaki on that fateful morning was that the Japanese guards came into Fukuoka 14 prison camp as usual to escort the prisoners to the shipyard. Upon arriving at the site, they saw that none of the Japanese workers had come in. This puzzled the soldiers, and the prisoners as well. (Presumably the civilian population had gotten wind of the Hiroshima explosion of three days earlier.)

Following some discussion amongst the guards, the prisoners were marched back to the camp where a few were given odd jobs to perform. Geoff and an Australian named Bernard O'Keefe were detailed to pump an accumulation of rain water from a concrete-slab-covered ditch which served as an air raid shelter. That completed, the two decided to lie low for a while, and Sherring, using a magnifying glass, prepared to light a smoke.

"Suddenly to my amazement," he [Geoffrey Sherring] has written, "a very, very brilliant and powerful light shone in from the opposite direction, completely eclipsing the sun, and of an entirely different colour. It was the colour of a welding flash, a blue, mostly ultra-violet flash. We scrambled out and found ourselves in choking dust and smoke which obliterated the bright sunshine. As this rolled back a little we felt very large drops of rain which were about as big as grapes and composed of dirty mud. These did not last very long, and the sight of the flattened city almost defied our comprehension. I suppose that stage of events lasted for about a minute, and after that the greatly accelerated pace of the day kept us working at top speed until nightfall.

"Hereafter I never felt so much a prisoner again and all the work I did seemed more to be a cooperation with the Japanese than a servitude. We helped with the cremation of their dead and with the collection and protection of various pieces of machinery."

NOte: On business card given to Geoff Sherring upon his return to Japan in 1985, it said Hibakusha (hibaku sha) or "Bombed Person."

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(Last Updated: January 15, 2004.)