Under the headline “Nagasaki Objective of Second Atomic Bomb,” residents woke up to the story.

“The world’s most destructive force, the atomic bomb, was used for the second time against Japan today, striking the important Kyushu island city of Nagasaki with observed ‘good results.’ More than one bomb may have been dropped in this second attack and it might have been of a different size than the first one which destroyed 60 percent of Hiroshima. The carefully worded communique said only that the second use of the atomic bomb had occurred, leaving to speculation all other details.

“Use of the awful weapon reached the campaign stage today with strategic Nagasaki as its second target.”

The path of destruction left by the bomb remains indescribable, even 75 years later.

National Archives photo This is the scene Ernest McCurdy attempted to describe in letters to his wife and his parents, who lived on Frank St. “It looks like a burned over junk pile with much debrie (sic) scattered about,” he wrote.

With the use of those bombs, the world would never be the same.

But Ernest G. and Mary Elizabeth McCurdy, living at 128 Frank St. in Warren, received a more personally significant report.

Their son — Ernest Arden McCurdy, a Chief Pharmacist Mate with the U.S. Navy serving with the Marines — was there.

And he wrote home to his parents and his wife, Mercy, about what he saw.

McCurdy was older than the typical GI — 40 when he arrived in Nagasaki in September 1945, just weeks after the bomb was dropped.

Library of Congress photo “Fat Man” — the code name given to the second atomic bomb — explodes over the city of Nagasaki. Ernest McCurdy would try to explain the devastation just over a month after the bomb was dropped.

His daughter, Mercy, shared her father’s letters with the Times Observer.

“Dad said he was born in Blue Jay,” she said. “He was raised in Guys Mills. My grandfather — my dad’s father — taught in a one-room schoolhouse.”

The family moved to Warren for work and Mercy said her father went to Warren High School and played football and basketball before moving on to a job at the Warren State Hospital.

From there, he went to nursing school — 1930 Census records appear to show him as a student in White Plains, N.Y. — and by 1940 was living in Washington D.C. with his wife, also named Mercy, and a daughter, Ann.

The first letter is dated Sept. 11 1945 and written to his wife.

All are signed “As ever with love, Mc.”

McCurdy was headed to Nagasaki from Okinawa on a relief mission to care for American and other Allied prisoners of war.

“We sort of feel that this is sort of (a) historical moment,” he wrote. “Every one is sort of in the dark as to what to expect. About all they have to go by is some photographs of the area.”

His concerns initially are for the treatment of the POWs and the possible diseases — tuberculosis, malaria, cholera — that the men might bring with them.

“So far we know little of the city of Nagasaki,” he told his wife. “Our doctor is responsible for this operation. It seems that one of his first jobs is to go ashore with x-ray film and (proceed) to the center of the atomic bomb crater and there try to determine the strength of the radiation.”

He wrote to her the next day as well and says he hasn’t seen much more of Nagasaki than the buoy where the U.S.S. Wichita was docked 1,000 feet from shore.

“All the area has been extensively bombed, apparently with fire bombs,” he wrote. “The area hit by the atomic bomb is over the ridge from us and only the sides of the hills and small area can be seen. Apparently the bomb exploded in the air and flattened everything as well as setting it on fire.”

The next day, he saw the destruction and wrote to both his wife and his parents on Frank St.

That letter to his parents was published in the Warren Times-Mirror once received.

He started the letter to his wife with the realization that he would be discharged within the next few months.

“It has been so long now that it is hard to believe that one is going to be out of the service,” he told her.

He then attempts to describe the indescribable.

“The area where the bomb fell was visited yesterday and it is almost impossible to describe,” he wrote. “It looks like a burned over junk pile with much debrie (sic) scattered about.”

He says he spoke with an interpreter who estimated the total killed instantly at 20,000 to 21,000 and about 60,000 who died later.

That death total is actually pretty close to historically accepted figures.

“The area was mostly industrial and not so many homes,” he said. “Machines of the factories are lieing (sic) around but there are no buildings. On the outskirts there are some skeletons of trees.”

He told his parents that the interpreter he was with “saw the plane fly over and the bomb drift down. She was in the middle of the street, there was a shaking of the earth and sound similar to thunder, and balls of fire.

“People in that area who were not killed had a great desire for water and when they jumped into a small stream they immediately died. The fire lasted for 10 days.”

“The area affected is about four square miles in a valley,” McCurdy added in the letter to his wife. “Everything is flattened and burned, a large ammunition factory is gone, a school building made of concrete has some of the pillars and outside walls standing.

He said there was a hospital with 900 patients that were all expected to die over a month after detonation.

“The bomb seemed to have more effect on steel and iron than concrete, twisting the beams like a tangled mass. Most or all the deaths were caused by x-ray burns. The bone marrow and (corpsucles) are destroyed.”

McCurdy died in 1987 at the age of 81 and is buried at the Southern Shores Cemetery near Kill Devil Hills, N.C.