This article is taken from the memoirs of Mother Bernardine Goulter, a Sacred Heart nun present when the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki. This account has never been published before and is reproduced with the kind permission of Dorothea Sibeth, her niece, and her order. (The Catholic Herald)

In recalling that dreadful day of August 9 1945 the words of Our Lord, “Watch, for you know not the day nor the hour”, came always before my mind. How many of the 350,000 inhabitants of Nagasaki rising that bright summer morning suspected that in one flash more than half the city’s population would be in eternity?

During the night there had been more than one raid and at about 6:30am the all-clear had been announced. The scanty breakfast was soon finished and everyone in the camp was hunting around trying to get some necessary duties done before the next raid. Our devoted Chinese cook and Komatsu san, our good Japanese woman, hurried off to get some provisions on the far side of the city. Those responsible for cutting grass for the cows set out up the mountain path, passing through the Grotto. It was a beautiful, bright summer morning, the water of the reservoir and the harbour blue and sparkling in the sunshine.

Now my narrative must become personal. Having climbed far and high to fill my basket, I had to return at a little before 11am as it was my duty on non-raid days to take the cow across the stream and mind her from 11am to 12. Passing down by the Grotto I turned aside and went up for a little visit to Our Lady, as was my custom. Just as I came away from the grotto I heard the unmistakable whirr of a B-29, a big four-propeller bomber capable of carrying 10 tons of equipment, as well as 50 me This day it carried a small, deadly weapon weighing only a few pounds and containing 300 grams of uranium. One man in that plane held the bomb packed in ice until the moment came to put it into the parachute and let it down to do its deadly work. These facts were told to us by the officers and men of the occupation army who entered Nagasaki soon after the peace.

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‘The explosion in the air was like the sun bursting’ (Catholic Herald)

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