Louis Kingma kept a log. Most of the entries are spare, little more than a date and a place. Still, nearly 60 years after World War II’s end, Kingma’s words are haunting.
“February 12, 1946. Arrived Nagasaki at 0300 hrs and moored to dock,” Kingma wrote. It was less than a month after he turned 19, and six months after atomic bombs dropped by the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The next day, there was this entry:
“Visited the atom bomb area today, not much to see, the area was wiped clean from the bomb blast.”
The 78-year-old Everett man has written “A Memoir,” a 135-page life story culled from family history, memory and logs he kept while in the Navy and throughout his later career in the U.S. Merchant Marine.
Kingma’s memoir briefly elaborates on the devastation at Nagasaki: “The only things remaining of the large factories were the vertical steel girders, which were now bent over to a horizontal like tall grass after a strong windstorm.”
He saw much during the war, serving aboard the USS Samaritan, a hospital ship. A Navy carpenter’s mate, his job was to build coffins.
Some of the dead were buried at sea. “Others, when we’d come to the next island, we’d send them ashore. They were buried in my makeshift coffins,” Kingma recalled Tuesday.
Saturday will mark 60 years since the bombing of Hiroshima. The Nagasaki bombing followed on Aug. 9, 1945, and on Aug. 15, 1945, Japan’s surrender brought an end to the war.
The atomic bombs killed at least 120,000 people outright, and many more over time. Despite the grim toll, Kingma has always been convinced the A-bombs spared lives.
At the time of the bombings, Kingma was in Portland, Ore. The Samaritan was temporarily back from the South Pacific to be refitted – for an inevitable invasion of Japan.
“When the bombs were dropped, we were very relieved there would be no invasion of Japan,” Kingma said.
He had already seen so many casualties of war.
“I had witnessed four island invasions, albeit on a hospital ship,” he said.
In bloody battles, the Navy and the Marine Corps lost thousands of men in the campaign for Okinawa, where the Samaritan took on patients.
“These islands where I witnessed invasions, the Japanese fought right to the last man,” Kingma said. “We expected that was going to happen in an invasion of Japan.
“I can imagine the results of an invasion. The number of Japanese killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki would probably have been just a token compared to how many would have been killed if we had invaded Japan,” he said.
In Nagasaki after the war, Kingma was surprised to meet a Japanese priest from a Catholic church there. The priest, he wrote in his log, “showed us the remains of his church, which was near the center of the blast.”
Amazingly, he said, “I can’t remember any concern about radiation at that time.”
Ever since then, Kingma has wondered whether American prisoners of war died in Nagasaki. He recalls the priest telling him a prisoner camp had been wiped out. The names of several U.S. POWs are included in an official list of victims kept by the city of Hiroshima.
Life after the war brought marriage and family. He and his wife, Josephine, have two daughters. Kingma served as a captain on oil tankers in the Merchant Marine. In 1982 and ‘83, when he was commander of the SS Worth, his wife came along to circumnavigate the globe as his ship delivered oil to ports in Turkey and Italy, Sweden and Scotland.
Kingma has always remembered the men rescued by his Navy ship. In October 1945, after the Japanese surrender, the Samaritan took on American and British prisoners of war.
“All are extremely thin, just skin and bones,” Kingma wrote in his log. “One is a brother to one of my shipmates, who didn’t recognize him. The brother had been taken prisoner in the Philippines early 1942. … Most of his teeth are gone from the guards’ rifle butts.”
Over coffee in his comfortable home near Everett’s Boeing plant, Kingma mused, “It’s hard to think back 60 years.
“Most veterans didn’t want to remember,” Josephine Kingma said. “They all just wanted to go home.”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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