Norfolk vet saw, firsthand, the fallout from A-bomb

NORFOLK

Army Pfc. Reid Carawan and some buddies drove a jeep into Hiroshima in October 1945. The city was rubble. Except for the steel skeletons of a few tall buildings, all was gone. A miles-long vista of obliterated factories, homes and shops.

Twisted metal beams. Pulverized concrete.

It had an odd, quiet order. Cleared streets. The shadow of a man on a pathway. A trapped corpse waiting for release.

Carawan, today a retired Norfolk police captain, chief magistrate and marriage commissioner, still holds wonder and regret as one of the first wave of GIs to see the destruction wrought by a single nuclear explosion on Aug. 6, 1945.

"It was almost impossible," he said. "One bomb could do all this."

He bought some postcards, returned to his duties and soon to civilian life. And for the next 50 years, kept the story mostly to himself.

Carawan grew up in Norfolk during the Depression. When war broke out, his older brother, Jack, joined the Navy. Reid Carawan was drafted but held back because he worked on aircraft at Norfolk Naval Station. His superiors let him go after a second draft notice.

Carawan trained as a military policeman and, after a few months stateside catching wayward GIs in New York City, became an infantryman and was sent to the Pacific.

As part of the 41st Infantry Division, Carawan landed in the Philippine region of Zamboanga to guard prisoners. As the Pacific battles stretched into 1945, the 41st Infantry readied for an invasion of Japan.

Carawan's unit was picked for the third wave to land. He would have rocked in a landing craft with dozens of other soldiers, splashed through the shallow Pacific waters toward a beach on the island of Kyushu and fought.

He didn't know it at the time, but the Japanese were also preparing for the invasion. "Men, women and children were trained," he said. "It would have been suicide."

American war planners anticipated that the invasion would bring massive U.S. and Japanese casualties.

But the bomb struck Hiroshima months before the planned offensive, and another destroyed Nagasaki. Combined, the two killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Carawan, ready for his first battle, never saw combat.

In October, after the surrender of Japan, the 41st Infantry became part of the first units to move into Hiroshima and the surrounding communities.

He and his fellow soldiers still knew little about atomic bombs.

Carawan directed traffic outside the devastated city.

Most GIs wanted to see the bomb's destruction. As Carawan and his friends toured the ruins, they saw railroad cars blown off tracks and on to their sides. Windows blown from every remaining building. The marks of a man left on the remnants.

"His whole shadow was there on the bridge - not him, the shadow," Carawan said.

Carawan obeyed orders and took no souvenirs.

At first, soldiers were told little about radiation, he said. He visited the city hospital. He saw the radiation burns on the sick and dying and never returned.

His unit served a few months in the area and was deactivated on New Year's Eve.

Carawan returned to Norfolk, joined the police force, and met his future bride, Mildred, a hospital nurse.

Over six decades, he rarely shared his story, even with his three children.

His son, Tom Carawan, remembers, as an 11-year-old during the Cuban Missile Crisis, asking his dad what to do if a nuclear bomb struck Norfolk Naval Station.

"Try to get into a ditch," his father told him. "But otherwise, don't worry too much about it."

Carawan, now 86, isn't one to boast, his family said.

And he finds nothing special about his service. He never fought in a battle, like some of his friends. Many of the men in his American Legion Post 35, in Ocean View, did far more, in his view, in the war - flew supplies in the Berlin Airlift and survived shipwrecks in the Pacific.

"You don't even belong in this post," he would tell himself.

But Tom Carawan sees it differently.

His father served. He survived. Without these twists of fate, Mildred and Reid Carawan might not have celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary in May.

A few years ago, Tom planned a trip to Hiroshima with his father. Reid Carawan's health and the prospect of the long plane flight scuttled the trip.

Reid Carawan wanted to visit the memorial shrine. He wanted to stop at a church, he said, and " say a little prayer."

Louis Hansen, (757) 446-2341, louis.hansen@pilotonline.com