Tomoo Noguchi’s testimony: “I saw the bomb being dropped”

My late father, Tomoo Noguchi, witnessed a single B-29 drop a bomb on Bomb Hill one summer morning shortly before his fifth birthday. Later, he and his father, Yoichiro Noguchi, my grandfather, went to look at the site. He remembered water collecting in a large crater beside a stream and trees being sheared off within an area of about 50 meters around it. Yoichiro picked up a fragment that looked like duralumin. It is now missing, but was said to have been silver-colored with very jagged marks.

Tomoo said he had clearly seen the B-29 and that it looked large. He remembered an enormous “da-daan” sound when the bomb struck. However, several other witnesses described cloudy weather with light rain, and U.S. records also report cloud cover, so it is possible that his recollection of seeing the aircraft clearly was mistaken. A B-29 has a large, 43-meter wingspan, but the recorded bombing altitude was about 8,839 meters. Even if he had seen it through a gap in the clouds, it probably would not have appeared very large. As a young child, he may simply have remembered it that way. Tomoo died in April 2020, before I began this investigation, so I never had the chance to ask him in detail.

Since childhood, whenever the war came up, I had heard this story from him repeatedly, alongside accounts of naval bombardment and balloon bombs. Knowing only that countless bombs had fallen across Japan, I thought he had happened to see just one of many. He also said, “Everyone said they must have thrown away a spare one-ton bomb in the hills.”

Following the naval bombardment of Hitachi on the night of July 17, 1945, Tomoo’s family had left their coastal home in old Isohara and taken refuge in a farm shed in the Shimakami area of Futatsushima, only 1.3 kilometers from the impact point. They apparently ended up living in that small shed for about ten years after the war. If they evacuated on July 18, he may have seen the bomb two days later, on the morning of July 20. The impact slope faced south, directly toward the place from which he watched. Tomoo, then about five, appears to have been the only family member who saw the drop; his parents, older sister and other relatives did not.