Machinists Mate First Class Harold L. Richardson, 26, is back in Newton for the first time since June, 1939, after having spent three years and four months as a prisoner of the Japanese and after having seen, from a distance of some 50 miles, the explosion of the second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, this year.
"It was about 4:30 o'clock in the afternoon and we were just coming in from the mine (an old condemned coal mine, where he and the many other prisoners were forced to work as slaves and located just across the bay from Nagasaki, when we heard a bomb explosion go off which attracted our attention because it was much louder than any or the others," Richardson said in telling of his experience in witnessing the historic event. "We all turned around and noticed immediately the columns and continuously rolling and growing white cloud which began to form and move high into the sky. This was followed by the appearance of flashes of extremely bright colors, predominately red and blue, and the white smoke cloud rose higher said higher. Later we learned that it rose to a height of some 45,000 feet," Richardson declared. "We thought our bombers had hit a chemical plant in Nagasaki and were very happy to see the destruction which had been done by the blast."
"We never knew that an atomic bomb had been dropped or that there was anything other than what we suspected—a bomb hitting a chemical plant—until the arrival of the American recovery team which came to our prison camp on Sept. 13. to liberate us almost a month to the day after the Japs had surrendered. Then we learned that what we had seen were the effects of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki," said the young U. S. Navy man. "We began to hear the Jap commanders of the prison camp make strange statements after the bomb had fallen, but they were always trying to start false rumors and we got so that we didn't pay much attention to them after awhile. However, we did hear the Japs say after the big blast that the Americans were not playing fair, that our forces were using something which they didn't know anything about and they made some statements about atoms and the like," Richardson stated. "We felt that they were just cooking up another batch of stories when they began reporting of the death toll from the one bomb at being at 175,000 and kept increasing the figure. It was not until the recovery team arrived that we learned that the toll was actually many times greater than the Japs had admitted and other facts concerning the bomb blast."
Richardson, who spent over three years on a diet of only rice and soup, who ate dog meat and snakes as "delicacies" while under Jap rule and who owns and wears a 1937 Newton High school ring which, along with a fountain pen, he managed to conceal from the Japs during all the long years of his captivity, plans to spend most of his 90 day leave time, which expires Jan. 23, in and around Newton.
More accounts or how he was several times beaten and savagely treated by his Japanese captors what life In the prison camp in which he was enslaved as a coal miner and later as a machine operator was like, and many other interesting facts surrounding the life and historic experiences of this Newton young man, who attended local schools and entered the navy in 1939, will be included in a more lengthy story to appear in The Daily News. ~ November 1945.