This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMaio. What are we supposed to do with the 541 girls,

the seven teachers, who weren't in class that morning, as was so often the case that summer?

The war was being lost, their writing was on the wall, if not in the official propaganda.

The Americans were firebombing ports and factories and airfields, lately whole cities.

Their city hadn't been attacked yet, but it was a matter of time. So their principal had decided

that helping prepare Hiroshima for the inevitable arrival of American bombers was more important

than geometry or poetry. The girls, 12 and 13 years old,

were put to work trying to limit destruction and save lives.

They were given shovels and helmets and hatchets and work gloves,

gray jumpsuits, and they pitched in,

demolishing and clearing wooden structures to make fire breaks.

So when the bombs came and the buildings burned, the firewinds spread in the ways that it had

in Kobe and Nagoya and Osaka and Yokohama that spring.

Toyama, an industrial town in the west coast, home to 160,000 people.

Its factories made steel and aluminum, but its houses, most

of its buildings like in Hiroshima, were made of wood.

American bombers appeared over Toyama.

The whole city burned to the ground.

That was August 1st, less than a week before the girls were out working one morning, breaking

up lumber, clearing it, dragging floorboards, window frames, as best as they could manage,

when the nuclear bomb exploded.

They died instantly, they probably didn't have time to be afraid.

...