Echoes of War

CAMARILLO —  It was 3:40 p.m. on Aug. 9, 1945, and POW Manuel Eneriz was being marched back to his camp 30 miles outside Nagasaki, Japan.

Then he heard a noise like nothing he had ever heard before.

“It was actually two explosions,” Eneriz recalled this week. “Maybe one was an echo. We looked up and saw that huge mushroom shape.” In the telling of it half a century later, he still cries.

Today, on the 52nd anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, Eneriz will go about life as usual in his Camarillo home.

But he will also think back to where he was on that historic day, when the detonation of the atomic bomb known as “Fat Man” effectively ended World War II.

“We had been getting American bombing raids coming over regularly,” said the 76-year-old Eneriz, who was an Army corporal when he was captured in the Philippines in 1942.

“But this bomb . . . you felt almost like an earthquake,” he said. “Those other raids didn’t feel like that. Afterward, the wind blew and it rained. The only thing we could think of was that maybe the Americans had bombed an ammo dump.

“We still didn’t realize it was anything special until we were liberated,” he said. “The Japanese guards at the POW camp only told us ‘No more war’ four days after the bomb.

“Then the Americans came and got us a couple of weeks later and put us on a train to the harbor. That was when we saw how Nagasaki was destroyed.

“But we still didn’t really understand. We said, ‘Atomic bomb? What’s that?’ ”

After his capture in the Philippines, Eneriz survived the infamous Bataan Death March before being shipped to a Japanese coal-mining POW camp.

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There, he survived bouts with malaria, dysentery, scurvy, pellagra and the occasional beating and stab wound by his captors. Those wounds earned him a Purple Heart many years after his discharge.

Interned with other soldiers from America, the Netherlands, Australia and England, he labored 10 hours a day in the mine until the day he saw the mushroom cloud.

The next day, his Japanese guards declared an “emperor’s holiday,” which meant the prisoners did not have to work their shifts.

On being liberated, his first act was to stuff himself with chocolate and doughnuts offered to the POWs.

It was a mistake.

“In 15 minutes I was so sick,” he said. “For 3 1/2 years, all I’d eaten was rice.”

But after what he had endured, Eneriz didn’t mind paying the novel price of eating too much rich food.

Today, his health is not particularly good. But Eneriz, who survived colon cancer in 1980, thinks it is amazing he is alive at all.

“After all that, and here I am at 76, hanging on. I met my wife, Angelita, in a Van Nuys Army hospital. I have four sons living in Southern California and 13 grandchildren.”

Eneriz spent 30 years working in quality control for Litton Systems in Woodland Hills before retiring in 1979.

After moving to Camarillo with his family in 1966, he made an unsuccessful run for a Camarillo City Council seat, but he says he is “a little too old to run again.”

He also did a stint on the Ventura County Grand Jury two years ago.

Eneriz says he will probably never know what relationship his exposure to the bomb’s radiation had with his cancer.

“They say that in the epicenter--a 3-mile radius--you don’t make it,” he said. “A 10-mile radius gives you radiation burns. The doctors wrote me a letter saying the amount of radiation I was exposed to was like two X-rays.”

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To this day he keeps a rosary made of black plastic beads nearby. He was wearing it around his neck when he was captured.

“Usually they’d take something like that away from you, but this Japanese guard had a string around his neck with a Buddhist pouch on it, so I pointed to his pouch, then to my rosary, like they sort of meant something similar, and he let me keep it.”

The rosary never left Eneriz’s neck during his ordeal.

And, he said, he forgives many of those who imprisoned him.

“Those guys, I guess they fought for their country like we did.”