TWO NEW ZEALANDERS SAW ATOMIC BOMB FALL

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 28 November 1945, Page 4

TWO NEW ZEALANDERS SAW ATOMIC BOMB FALL

Wellington, Nov. 27 Two New Zealanders who returned in the destroyer Wizard were within close range of the atomic bomb when it fell on Nagasaki. They were Signalman I. Shipman. Timaru, and "Stoker G. Paterson, Newtown, Wellington. Both were on British ships sunk in 1942 by the Japanese, and were in a prison camp six miles away when the second atomic bomb hit Nagasaki. “After the first bomb hit Hiroshima tho Japs got into an awful panic.” Signalman Shipman, said yesterday. “When the plane carrying the second bomb came Over Nagasaki, we thought little of It, having no idea what it was about to drop. It was just before 11 on a fine, clear morning. We saw four parachutes come down and thought they were incendiary bombs. Then there was a terrific flash, like the flash of a photographer’s lamp, magnified 1.000,000 times. Two seconds later there was a blast that I couldn’t even describe. It brought terrific heat — about 200 degrees Fahrenheit. I should say. and a 100-miie-an-hour gale.

“I was knocked flat by the blast, though we were six miles away,” Signalman Shipman said. “By the time 1 recovered it was all over. We suffered so much from shock that we couldn’t speak, but fust wandered round looking at one another. Two days later they told us it was some now type of bomb, and an American dentist and an English doctor among the prisoners put their heads together and decided that the splitting of the atom must have been the secret of it.”