We Fled From Bombs—50 Years Later!
“Bombs will be exploding here soon. Everyone take shelter!”
WITH those words my husband and I were warned by a policeman to leave the house and take refuge in a nearby concrete bunker. The announcement came as quite a shock. After all, we were not in some war-torn region of the world; we were visiting friends on one of the beautiful outer atolls of the Marshall Islands, in Micronesia.
We had come to spend a week with a friend and her husband on the small island of Tõrwã. The wife was the only Witness of Jehovah on the island, and we wanted to help her preach to the people who lived there.
The Marshallese are friendly by nature and are eager to talk about the Bible. Since the book You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth had recently been released in the local language, we had a good opportunity to place a number of copies. All who wanted the book assured us that they would read it and not use it as a ken karawan, or “good luck charm,” to ward off demons. A popular custom there is to place a rolled-up page from the Bible inside a bottle and hang it from a rafter or a nearby tree, as that is thought to keep evil spirits away.
For several days we had been enjoying our stay, but when Saturday came, we soon realized that it was going to be different. We had begun the day with a pleasant early-morning swim in the clear, warm waters of the lagoon. While walking back from the beach, we saw an ominous-looking gray ship approaching. Before long, we found out what it brought. A policeman explained that a team of seven American military men had arrived to detonate old bombs on the island. To ensure the safety of the public, homes would be evacuated and islanders would spend the day in bunkers that had been built by the Japanese during World War II.
Those bunkers, which visitors to Tõrwã notice almost immediately, are testimony to a ghastly past. From a distance the island looks every bit like a tropical paradise, but close up it becomes evident that Tõrwã’s beauty is marred by the scars of a war that ended some 50 years ago. Once a major Japanese air base, the island is littered with reminders of World War II. Everywhere, there are rusting war relics—fighter planes, mounted guns, and torpedoes—overgrown with tropical plant life.
It is the leftover bombs, however, that are most alarming. During the war, U.S. military forces dropped more than 3,600 tons of bombs, napalm, and rockets on Tõrwã, and the Japanese forces had their own arsenal of bombs and weapons on the ground. While it is unlikely that a 50-year-old bomb would explode, they are always potentially hazardous, which explains why bomb-disposal teams have visited the island at least five times since 1945, the year the war ended.
We wondered if the warning was actually true, so we walked to the area where the bomb-disposal team had come ashore and spoke with them. Not only was the warning true, they said, but bomb explosions would begin within the hour! If we did not take shelter in a bunker, we were told, we would have to leave the island right away.
Our friend decided to remain on Tõrwã and found protection inside a large machine-gun nest with several families. She later told us that the only windows in the old concrete bunker were its gun ports and that, inside, it was uncomfortably hot and crowded. Spending the day there brought back memories of the war years, and she confessed that while the exploding bombs fascinated her as a child, they now seemed quite frightening.
Her husband had agreed to transport us to Wollet Island, five miles away, in a small boat equipped with an outboard motor. We were gone only a few minutes when we heard a loud boom. Turning back toward Tõrwã, we saw a column of smoke rising near the island’s residential area. Soon, there was another explosion and then a third, much larger, blast.
We spent the day preaching on Wollet, and it was a day punctuated by distant bomb blasts. The old bombs had been located and marked several months in advance. Ordnance was found far and wide—on the shorelines, inland by the airstrip, and even in people’s backyards! To reduce the number of explosions, the bomb-disposal team had gathered a number of smaller bombs and then detonated them together.
It was almost sunset when we returned to Tõrwã. As we drew near the island, we noticed that the familiar smoke from cooking fires was missing. We knew something was wrong. Suddenly, a small boat sped toward us, warning us not to go any closer. One large submerged bomb still remained to be detonated near the reef. Thus, as we drifted offshore at dusk, we witnessed something that most people alive today have never seen—an underwater explosion of a World War II bomb, which sent a plume of water and smoke hundreds of feet into the air!
Happily, no one on Tõrwã was hurt that day. Did the bomb-disposal team finally rid the island of all leftover bombs? Probably not. The team leader said that he expected islanders to stumble upon more old ordnance in the future. Of course, that gave us something to talk to the people about as we finished our preaching work on Tõrwã. It was quite a privilege to tell these island folk about the time when Jehovah’s Kingdom will make “wars to cease to the extremity of the earth.”—Psalm 46:9.
As told by Nancy Vander Velde
[Picture on page 27]
An unexploded bomb